Category Archives: Culture

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Killington The truth shall set you free . . . if you are free to tell the truth

After being graduated from high school in Mt Sterling, Kentucky, I was more than ready to leave the small town and head for Lexington, and the University of Kentucky. It wasn’t like I could afford Hahvahd, anyway. I lived in the Bluegrass State’s second-largest city from 1971 through the end of 1984, before moving to the Old Dominion for better job prospects. Yeah, I tend to concentrate on foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia when it comes to crime, but it seems that while Killadelphia sounds more closely like Philadelphia than Killington sounds like Lexington, they’re becoming a bit too much alike.

I was ready to write about Lexington’s 32nd homicide of the year, when I opened the Lexington Herald-Leader’s website and found that the story about the 32nd murder was already out-of-date:

Man fatally shot on Devonport Drive, Lexington police say. It’s the second homicide this week

by Christopher Leach | Friday, September 2, 2022 | 7:14 AM EDT | updated: 8:05 AM EDT

Lexington police are investigating the second reported homicide of the week after a man was fatally shot early Friday.

The shooting happened in the 2000 block of Devonport Drive, near the intersection of Alexandria Drive and Versailles Road, around 12:55 a.m. Lt. Joe Anderson with the Lexington Police Department said responding officers found a man with a gunshot wound when they arrived at the scene.

The man was sent to the hospital, where he later died, according to Anderson. His identity will be announced by the Fayette County coroner after next of kin is notified. . . . .

This is the 33rd killing of 2022, nearing the annual homicide record of 37 set last year. This is also the second homicide this week after Dietrich Murray, 29, was shot and killed on Wednesday.

There’s a little more at the original.

In 2019, Lexington set its all-time homicide record of 30. Then, in 2020, Lexington broke that with 34 murders, and, in 2021, set it again at 37 dead bodies littering the city’s streets.

The city is on the slow side when it comes to putting information up on its websites. The city’s homicide investigations page hasn’t, as of this writing at 8:34 AM EDT on Friday, September 2nd, even included the 32nd killing, which occurred before noon, two days ago. But it does include the homicide investigations from 2021 on the same page, and the 33rd killing last year occurred on November 20th, 79 days later in the year.

Unlike Philadelphia, which averages almost 1½ homicides per day, much smaller Lexington, 321,793 versus 1,576,251 residents, averages only 0.1346938775510204 per day, or one every 7.42 days. That means that statistical projections are a bit more iffy; with one homicide every week, just a couple of weeks in which no one bothers to kill someone else can really throw off projections. Something as simple as a rainy weekend can keep the bad guys indoors more, and out on the bad street corners less.

Nevertheless, the current numbers work out to a projected 49.16 murders for the year.

So, what’s changed? As we noted on Thursday, Mayor Jim Kenney (D-Philadelphia) was blaming Philly’s huge homicide record on Republicans, on everyone but himself. Just as in Philly, Lexington has been operating on the same firearms control laws for years, so it isn’t a change in Kentucky’s constitutional carry gun control laws. A lot of big city politicians tried to blame the 2020 surge in killings on COVID-19, or the reaction to the unfortunate death-during-arrest of methamphetamine-and-fentanyl-addled convicted felon George Floyd, but that was two years ago! COVID-19 restrictions mostly eased by the end of 2020, and certainly by mid 2021, so it’s difficult to blame them. In Philly, the homicide rate surged from 1.4578 per day at the end of the Labor Day holiday weekend, to 1.7155 for the period from September 7 through December 31, 2021, when the vast majority of COVID-19 restrictions had been lifted and the public schools had been opened, albeit with mask mandates.

Something else has happened, something cultural that legitimizes bad guys carrying guns and blowing away people for trivial reasons. Yes, Kentucky’s firearms laws are less strict than Pennsylvania’s but Lexington’s 2021 homicide rate of 11.498 per 100,000 population was far lower than Philly’s 35.654.[1]The math: 37 homicides in 2021 ÷ 3.21793 = Lexington’s 2021 homicide rate; 562 homicides in 2021 ÷ 15.76251 = Philly’s homicide rate, expressed in homicides per 100,000 population.

Lexington’s homicide investigations page does not specify the race or ethnicity of murder victims, and the murder victims are specifically excluded from the city’s non-fatal shootings investigations page. But of the 87 non-fatal shootings listed as of August 27, 2022, 16, 18.39%, of the victims are listed as white, 5, 5.75%, are listed as Hispanic, which can be of any race, and 66, 75.86%, are listed as black.

Lexington’s population are not 75.86% black.

At some point, we have to look at the numbers, because numbers don’t lie. Pointing out these numbers, as I have previously, will be denounced as raaaaacist, but, unlike a lot of bloggers, I am retired, and have no job from which I can worry about being ‘canceled’. I can tell the unvarnished truth, the way so many others cannot.

And the truth is important: you cannot solve a problem if you are unwilling to identify the problem correctly, and it is wholly politically incorrect to identify the problem correctly these days.

Well, here’s another truth: everybody does know the problem, but as is obvious in Philly, most would rather ignore the fact that the homicide problem in our cities is primarily a black problem. So many would rather simply accept a ‘disproportionate’ number of murders among black city dwellers than admit that the problem exists within our black communities.

 

There is, however, another problem which jumps out at me, and it’s a problem that today’s left really don’t want to admit. The left believe that one change necessary to combat global warming climate change is greater population density, more people living closer to their jobs, not having as long commutes, and a greater ability for more people to take subways, trains and buses to work than their evil personal cars. But if there’s one real physical difference between Philadelphia and Lexington, it’s that the poorer areas in Lexington are not the rowhouse type of neighborhoods that dominate much of Philly. Even in the poorer neighborhoods in Lexington, housing is far more likely to be physically separate dwellings, far more likely to have a bit of yard between houses. This is not to say that there are no rowhouses in Lexington; there are, though interestingly enough many of them are in the gentrified areas north of the University of Kentucky campus, on South and North Limestone Street, along parts of Upper Street. And if you are really, really angry at someone, if you live further apart, it will take you longer to go home and get your gun — assuming that you aren’t carrying it — than in Philly, and those few extra seconds may be the ones which give you the time to realize, hey, if I blow that rat bastard away, I might just spend the rest of my life in Eddyville.

Row houses on Broadway in Jim Thorpe, during 2012 St Patrick’s Day Parade. Click to enlarge.

Could that be part of the reason that heavily rural Carbon County, population 64,749, where I lived in Pennsylvania, under the same gun control laws as Philly, went many years straight with zero homicides, even though it’s an area with a lot of hunters and most people own firearms? As nearly as I could find — the data are scattered, not consolidated, and it’s possible I missed something — there was one murder in Lehighton in 2004 and another in 2006, and those were the only murders in Carbon County from 2001 through 2019. Other than going up Broadway in Jim Thorpe, there are very few rowhouses. When the murder rate in Philadelphia was 22.197 per 100,000 population, in 2019 — boy, how low that seems compared to now! — and zero in Carbon County, with both under the same firearms laws, perhaps, just perhaps, it might be considered that the firearms laws aren’t really the problem.

Those two murders? One was a strangulation and beating of a mother by her son, and the other a stabbing following an argument.

But, at some point, we have to look at race and population density, both things the left are horrified to contemplate as being contributing factors, when it comes to crime in general, and murder specifically.

References

References
↑1 The math: 37 homicides in 2021 ÷ 3.21793 = Lexington’s 2021 homicide rate; 562 homicides in 2021 ÷ 15.76251 = Philly’s homicide rate, expressed in homicides per 100,000 population.
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In Philadelphia, Black Lives Don’t Matter!

The mission of journalism is to report the news, the truth, to the public, even if it means digging deeply into things that some people, particularly people in positions of power, do not want disclosed. Journalists must have an open mind, to see the truth, even if the truth is not what they wanted or expected, and report it accurately. 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, on the other hand, only see what they want to see.

Philly’s gun violence epidemic reaches a perilous new low as a 7-year-old is shot while playing video games | Editorial

The only thing more disturbing than the relentless pace of shootings in the city is the lack of action and outrage from those sworn to protect residents.

by the Editorial Board | Tuesday, August 23, 2022

In case city leaders have yet to realize that gun violence has reached epidemic proportions, consider the following: A 7-year-old boy was sitting in his bedroom playing video games Saturday night when he was shot in the thigh by a stray bullet from outside his home.

The shooting of a boy innocently playing in his bedroom should shake city leaders to their core and spark a full-throated call to action. So should the latest tally of weekend gun violence in Philadelphia: 21 people were shot between Saturday and Sunday.

At one point, the shootings were occurring minutes apart. An unidentified male was shot in the head at 12:21 a.m. on Sunday. Five minutes later, a 23-year-old man was shot in the back. Just 24 minutes later, a 59-year-old man was shot in the buttocks and left thigh.

The only thing more disturbing than the relentless pace of shootings that continues unabated across the city is the lack of action and outrage from those sworn to protect residents. What will it take for Mayor Jim Kenney, District Attorney Larry Krasner, Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw, and City Council to do something — anything — to try to stem the flow of blood?

On May 9, 2021, the same Editorial Board which expressed such outrage, endorsed Larry Krasner for re-election. It wasn’t that the Editorial Board did not know what the city had in Mr Krasner; on that same May 9, 2021, the City of Brotherly Love suffered its 183rd murder of the year, an average of 1.4186 per day, a whopping 46 more than on the same date in 2020.

In 2020, the city saw 499 murders, just one short of the record set during the crack cocaine wars of 1990.

On May 9, 2021, the Editorial Board knew that it was Mr Krasner and his office which let Hasan Elliot out on the streets, when they could have locked him up for a parole violation, and that Mr Elliot then killed Philadelphia Police Corporal James O’Connor. The Editorial Board know that under Mr Krasner prosecution of arrests for illegal firearms possession have dropped dramatically. Yet now that are asking, “What will it take,” for Mr Krasner “to do something — anything — to try to stem the flow of blood?”

“Something” and “anything” apparently does not include something really radical like locking up criminals. In their endorsement of Mr Krasner, the Board wrote:

A complex, relatively recent spike in gun violence isn’t a reason to return to the mass incarceration regime of yesteryear, but a challenge to do better.

Oddly enough, the “mass incarceration regime of yesteryear” was coincident with a significant reduction in murders in Philly. As we noted on August 9th, under Philadelphia under Mayor Jim Kenney and District Attorney Larry Krasner have led the city into more homicides so far in 2022 than any entire year under previous Mayor Michael Nutter, District Attorney Seth Williams, and Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey.

Are the Editorial Board now willing to try “mass incarceration” again? That would certainly fall under trying “anything” “to try to stem the flow of blood,” wouldn’t it?

How about “stop and frisk”? With the ever-mounting toll of shootings and death, City Council President Darrell Clarke floated the idea of a return to the “stop and frisk” policies. The Editorial Board didn’t like that idea, either:

The rise in gun violence has prompted some City Council members to call for the Police Department to reexamine its stop-and-frisk policy. While the idea is well intended, it should be a nonstarter.

The Philadelphia Police Department has a long history of racial discrimination and brutality aimed at the Black and Latino communities.

In 2010, the American Civil Liberties Union sued the city, alleging police used racial profiling to illegally stop, search, and detain thousands of people. To settle the lawsuit, the Police Department agreed to collect data on all stop-and-frisks and train officers in the use of the tactic.

In the years since, the practice has continued with significant modifications — chief among them: Officers must have sound legal suspicions to make stops. As a result, the number of stops has fallen precipitously: In 2015, police made nearly 400,000 pedestrian stops; this year, officers are on track for about 10,000 stops.

Also in 2015: Philadelphia saw 280 homicides. Since then, the city has seen 277, followed by 315, 353, 356, 499 and 562 murders each subsequent year, and 352 so far this year. We can’t know that the reduction from 400,000 to about 10,000 pedestrian stops has contributed the huge rise in murders, but the numbers do seem rather stark.

That’s another “something,” “anything” the Editorial Board don’t want the city to try.

The problem is that the Editorial Board are too blind to see the problem! The police do not stop crimes; the police respond to crimes, clean up the mess left behind by crimes, and try to arrest the perpetrators of crimes. Yes, the very short-staffed Philadelphia Police Department are not solving enough crimes, and yes, the George Soros-sponsored District Attorney is not prosecuting crimes seriously enough, both of which reduce the deterrent to the bad guys when it comes to committing crimes, but the actual prevention of crime is not something the city government can do.

The prevention of crime comes from children being reared right, in stable, two-parent homes, but it’s far, far, far too politically incorrect to say that. And when the city government, and The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Editorial Board, and all of its opinion columnists, and all of the media coverage support the killing of children who are simply too inconvenient to be allowed to live, can it really be a surprise that that message is getting through to the teenagers and twenty-somethings on the street?

The left look for the problem everywhere but where it is. Inquirer columnist Jenice Armstrong wrote, on July 20th, Philly needs new solutions to prevent gun violence. Not conversations. And not parties. In it, she wrote:

After putting it off for years, I finally got around to participating in the Beer Summit put on by Global Citizen, the nonprofit group that organizes the Martin Luther King Day of Service.

Billed as a “conversation on race, class, and power,” the annual gathering — which began in 2009 when President Barack Obama convened a “beer summit” at the White House with Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates and Cambridge, Mass., police Sgt. James Crowley, after Gates’ arrest — was virtual this year, so I could watch the recording at my leisure.

There was lots of good commentary. As Temple University’s David Brown pointed out, “The whole notion of the Beer Summit is to bring different people from different perspectives along and [focus] on a common challenge in a community.”

This year’s theme was gun violence sparked by white supremacy.

She has got to be kidding. Yes, there have been a few mass shootings by supposed “white supremacists,” but the number of their victims pales in comparison to the numbers of black Philadelphians being killed by other black Philadelphians. Unlike Philadelphia, St Louis, our most murderous city, breaks down its homicide cases on race. In a city in which slightly less than half the population are black, 121 out of 130 homicides as of August 24th had black victims, and out of 84 known suspects, 83 are black.

It isn’t “white supremacy” killing all of those black victims in the Gateway City, and it hasn’t been “white supremacy” killing all of those victims in Philly. But Jenice Armstrong, the Editorial Board, and almost everyone else can’t bring themselves to tell the truth: the blood being spilled by the mostly black victims of shootings has been spilled by black assailants.

Me? I can say it, because I’m retired, and I can’t be ‘canceled,’ can’t lose my job for doing something really radical like telling the truth. As horrible as the homicide rates have been in Philly, in St Louis, in Baltimore and Chicago, they really aren’t that bad for white people.

In Philly, black lives don’t matter, or at least they don’t matter as much as the left keeping their mouths shut as far as telling the truth is concerned. The key to reducing the carnage is to stop supporting the social policies and tolerances which have produced it.

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.
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Killadelphia

My good friend Robert Stacy McCain noted the drive-by shootings at the Shepard Recreation Center in West Philadelphia, complete with a link back to our story on the gunfire. 🙂

Mr McCain posited his story Sunday evening, concluding:

Like so much else in the “progressive” agenda, the soft-on-crime policies of Soros-backed District Attorney Larry Krasner are hurting the people whom Democrats imagine to be the beneficiaries. All this talk about “civil rights” and “social justice” won’t help you if you’re dead, and 346 people have already been murdered this year in Philadelphia, which is on pace to break the homicide record the city set last year.

Alas! The Philadelphia Police Department only updates their Current Crime Statistics Page during ‘normal business hours’ Monday through Friday, so Mr McCain’s statistics are behind the times; the weekend’s toll pushed it up to an even 350 dead bodies.

350 murders ÷ 233 days elapsed in the year = 1.5021 homicides per day, x 365 = 548 projected killings for the year. While the city is six murders ahead of the same date last year, last year saw a bit of a ‘lull’ in the killings between July 9th and the end of the Labor Day holiday, at which point the murder rate really picked up from 1.4578 to 1.7715 per day.

Many on the left, following the unfortunate death of methamphetamine-and-fentanyl-addled convicted felon George Floyd as he resisted arrest in Minneapolis demanded that cities “defund the police,” something Philadelphia’s city government made noises about but, in the end, did not do; the police department’s budget grew by $30 million this year. Trouble is, the Philadelphia Police Department has been defunded, not by government action, but by officers leaving the force:

The Philly Police Department is short 1,300 officers. Here’s why the situation is about to get worse.

Police leaders have blamed both the city’s uniquely stringent hiring requirements and a national shortage of people who want to become police officers.

by Anna Orso and Ryan W. Briggs | Friday, August 19, 2022

The Philadelphia Police Department has faced a critical shortage of officers for months — one that’s all but certain to get worse as hundreds more cops plan to leave.

With the police force already operating about 20% below its target staffing level, more than 800 officers and civilian employees have set retirement dates within the next four years by enrolling in the city’s deferred pension program.

The decades-old program helps officials prepare for the departure of longtime employees by allowing city workers to begin collecting on pension benefits four years before they retire. Fresh pension records analyzed by The Inquirer show the number of Police Department enrollees doubled in four years.

The figures mean officers are leaving faster than the department can recruit them. The force is virtually guaranteed to see about 200 retirements for each of the next four years. But this year, just 120 cadets will be eligible to graduate from the police academy.

Part of the reason I didn’t note this story previously was that it was subscribers’ only content, and linking back to it still meant that readers of The First Street Journal still couldn’t see it, and could not check to see that I had quoted the story accurately. However, WPVI-TV, Channel 6, the ABC owned-and-operated station in the City of Brotherly Love, had at least a brief story on the same subject.

While cities across the nation are experiencing a loss of municipal workers, possibly due to mayors imposing COVID-19 vaccine mandates — as we noted earlier this month, Mayor Jim Kenney has already fired 15, and there are 68 more set to be terminated — Philadelphia being no exception, the PPD under Commissioner Danielle Outlaw is hemorrhaging personnel faster than other city departments. In a city in which the Police Commissioner does not stand behind her officers, and the District Attorney takes far more delight in prosecuting police officers than actual criminals, who would want to be a cop in Philly? In a city in which Larry Krasner could get not just elected on an anti-police and refusing to prosecute some offenses platform, but re-elected, by landslide margins in both the primary and general elections after the city’s homicide rate soared, what incentive can there really be to strap on your equipment only to be shot at from all sides, from the criminals to the District Attorney’s office to The Philadelphia Inquirer and its constant attacks on officers?

Simply put, the Philadelphia Police Department has been defunded, not by the city, but by the actions of the people of Philadelphia. Fewer crimes get solved, police presence is diminished, and many criminals actually arrested don’t get prosecuted, and thus we come back to the city’s crime rate. With fewer crimes solved, deterrence of crime decreases. With fewer police officers on the streets, fewer potential incidents of bad guys just opening fire on other bad guys — the majority of city homicides — are prevented.

All of this is exactly what the people of Philadelphia want, as indicated by how they actually vote.

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How Daniel Panneton used 1,183 words to tell us that he’s a great researcher who doesn’t understand a single thing about his subject

Daniel Panneton’s Twitter bio. Click to enlarge.

Daniel Panneton tells us, in his Twitter biography, that he is a “Museums worker and online hate researcher”. He also tells us that he is very afraid to let the Unapproved see his tweets. I looked, but was unable to find a significantly more detailed biography of Mr Panneton. A writer for The Atlantic, he has had published several other articles from which anyone who can read can discern his very much #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 leftist bias.

And now? This obviously well-read has decided that traditional Catholics are now evil reich-wing Protestants! I’m pretty sure that both Catholics and our separated brethren wouldn’t see it that way.

How Extremist Gun Culture Co-Opted the Rosary

The AR-15 is a sacred object among Christian nationalists. Now “radical-traditional” Catholics are bringing a sacrament of their own to the movement.

By Daniel Panneton | Sunday, August 14, 2022 | 8:00 AM EDT

Just as the AR-15 rifle has become a sacred object for Christian nationalists in general, the rosary has acquired a militaristic meaning for radical-traditional (or “rad trad”) Catholics. On this extremist fringe, rosary beads have been woven into a conspiratorial politics and absolutist gun culture. These armed radical traditionalists have taken up a spiritual notion that the rosary can be a weapon in the fight against evil and turned it into something dangerously literal.

While some people might not understand that a crucifix is more commonly Catholic than Protestant, almost no one would mistake that a rosary is a Catholic symbol. What Mr Panneton has missed is that no one who prays the rosary these days is out shooting people.

Their social-media pages are saturated with images of rosaries draped over firearms, warriors in prayer, Deus Vult (“God wills it”) crusader memes, and exhortations for men to rise up and become Church Militants. Influencers on platforms such as Instagram share posts referencing “everyday carry” and “gat check” (gat is slang for “firearm”) that include soldiers’ “battle beads,” handguns, and assault rifles. One artist posts illustrations of his favorite Catholic saints, clergy, and influencers toting AR-15-style rifles labeled sanctum rosarium alongside violently homophobic screeds that are celebrated by social-media accounts with thousands of followers.The theologian and historian Massimo Faggioli has described a network of conservative Catholic bloggers and commentary organizations as a “Catholic cyber-militia” that actively campaigns against LGBTQ acceptance in the Church.

Considering that the Bible is very explicit in its condemnation of homosexual activity, and the Catechism affirms that,[2]§2357 Homosexuality refers to relations between men or between women who experience an exclusive or predominant sexual attraction toward persons of the same sex. It has taken a great variety of … Continue reading it is the duty of all Catholics to fight against the approval of homosexual activity. To Mr Panneton, this is just wholly, wholly wrong.

These rad-trad rosary-as-weapon memes represent a social-media diffusion of such messaging, and they work to integrate ultraconservative Catholicism with other aspects of online far-right culture. The phenomenon might be tempting to dismiss as mere trolling or merchandising, and ironical provocations based on traditionalist Catholic symbols do exist, but the far right’s constellations of violent, racist, and homophobic online milieus are well documented for providing a pathway to radicalization and real-world terrorist attacks. The rosary—in these hands—is anything but holy. But for millions of believers, the beads, which provide an aide-mémoire for a sequence of devotional prayers, are a widely recognized symbol of Catholicism and a source of strength. And many take genuine sustenance from Catholic theology’s concept of the Church Militant and the tradition of regarding the rosary as a weapon against Satan. As Pope Francis said in a 2020 address, “There is no path to holiness … without spiritual combat,” and Francis is only one of many Church officials who have endorsed the idea of the rosary as an armament in that fight.

I will admit to some amusement that this article was published on Sunday, August 14th, the same day as this Gospel reading in our Catholic Churches:

Luke 12:49 “I have come to cast fire upon the earth; and how I wish it were already kindled!
50 But I have a baptism to undergo, and how distressed I am until it is accomplished!
51 Do you suppose that I came to grant peace on earth? I tell you, no, but rather division;
52 for from now on five members in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three.
53 They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.”

Mr Panneton has managed to wholly misunderstand what Pope Francis has said. “Spiritual combat” means to fight, with prayer, for the right ideas.

However, this is where the author truly shows how little he understands about his subject. There is no greater enemy of the “Church Militant” than Pope Francis, who has been doing his best to stamp out the Tridentine, or Traditional Latin, Mass.

Daniel Panneton, photo from his protected Twitter profile.

In mainstream Catholicism, the rosary-as-weapon is not an intrinsically harmful interpretation of the sacramental, and this symbolism has a long history. In the 1930s and ’40s, the ultramontane Catholic student publication Jeunesse Étudiante Catholique regularly used the concept to rally the faithful. But the modern radical-traditionalist Catholic movement—which generally rejects the Second Vatican Council’s reforms—is far outside the majority opinion in the Roman Catholic Church in America. Many prominent American Catholic bishops advocate for gun control, and after the Uvalde school shooting, Bishop Daniel Flores of Brownsville, Texas, lamented the way some Americans “sacralize death’s instruments.”Militia culture, a fetishism of Western civilization, and masculinist anxieties have become mainstays of the far right in the U.S.—and rad-trad Catholics have now taken up residence in this company. Their social-media accounts commonly promote accelerationist and survivalist content, along with combat-medical and tactical training, as well as memes depicting balaclava-clad gunmen that draw on the “terrorwave” or “warcore” aesthetic that is popular in far-right circles.

Like such networks, radical-traditional Catholics sustain their own cottage industry of goods and services that reinforces the radicalization. Rosaries are common among the merchandise on offer—some made of cartridge casings, and complete with gun-metal-finish crucifixes. One Catholic online store, which describes itself as “dedicated to offering battle-ready products and manuals to ‘stand firm against the tactics of the devil’” (a New Testament reference), sells replicas of the rosaries issued to American soldiers during the First World War as “combat rosaries.” Discerning consumers can also buy a “concealed carry” permit for their combat rosary and a sacramental storage box resembling an ammunition can. In 2016, the pontifical Swiss Guard accepted a donation of combat rosaries; during a ceremony at the Vatican, their commander described the gift as “the most powerful weapon that exists on the market.”

The militarism also glorifies a warrior mentality and notions of manliness and male strength. This conflation of the masculine and the military is rooted in wider anxieties about Catholic manhood—the idea that it is in crisis has some currency among senior Church figures and lay organizations. In 2015, Bishop Thomas Olmsted of Phoenix issued an apostolic exhortation calling for a renewal of traditional conceptions of Catholic masculinity titled “Into the Breach,” which led the Knights of Columbus, an influential fraternal order, to produce a video series promoting Olmsted’s ideas. But among radical-traditional Catholic men, such concerns take an extremist turn, rooted in fantasies of violently defending one’s family and church from marauders.

You know, this reminds me of Amanda Marcotte’s argument in her 2008 book, It’s a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments. Miss Marcotte had been arguing, for a long time — and still does — that evil reich wing conservatives don’t just want to ban prenatal infanticide, but artificial contraception as well. But when it came to actually documenting her claim, the only thing with which she could come up was Quiverfull, a belief set more than an organization, the adherents to which, according to a 2006 guesstimate, range in “the thousands to the low tens of thousands”.

Miss Marcotte managed to conflate maybe 10,000 families to a nationwide assault on contraception, and now, Mr Panneton is conflating the rosary, something millions of Catholics have, and something I have hanging from the rear-view mirror of my very masculine Ford F-150, as meaning I have an AR-15 that I’m ready to use to kill queers, abortionists, illegal immigrants, liberals, girly boys and Novus Ordo Catholics.

There’s more at Mr Panneton’s 1,183-word original, but it’s a lot of the same, the conflation of a small number of people into a national menace, and the possession of a rosary as a visible symbol, practically a swastika, showing just how horribly evil we are.

I have a rosary hanging from the rear view mirror of my F-150.

Of course, some of his sources are silly ones, such as citing Salon to prove that Catholics are a “growing contingent” of Christian nationalism, and Media Matters for America complaining that Twitter should take action against people calling groomers, groomers. About the only thing he failed to mention was Libs of TikTok.

The author’s tactics are familiar. The New Yorker noted a complaint by a black United States Postal Service worker that he was the subject of racial discrimination because some other workers wore caps with the Gadsden flag, and some have even called the thirteen-star Betsy Ross flag a symbol of hate. The old “OK” hand sign has been labeled a hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League.

There are two things going on here. One is that the left are trying, once again, to control what speech or expression is acceptable, in an attempt to limit the terms of debate by limiting how the debate may be held. If Mr Panneton had his way, if I drove to a county commissioner’s meeting with the rosary visible in my F-150, I would be ostracized and, who knows, perhaps even escorted off the property by the police for having the alt-right symbol of a rosary.

But there’s more. Mr Panneton’s motives are really pretty clear: he wants to attack Catholicism itself, by trying to make actual Catholics into Enemies of the Republic, people who, if seen with a rosary, ought to be shunned as Nazis, reported to the police, and fired from their jobs. After all, we are all heavily armed, right?

Nevertheless, he’s being pretty stupid. Other than topics of sexual morality, which are explicitly set down in the Bible, Catholic priests and theologians tend to be pretty liberal politically. Perhaps alienating people who be (mostly) your allies isn’t the wisest thing he could 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

  • §2357 Homosexuality refers to relations between men or between women who experience an exclusive or predominant sexual attraction toward persons of the same sex. It has taken a great variety of forms through the centuries and in different cultures. Its psychological genesis remains largely unexplained. Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.” They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.
  • §2358 The number of men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not negligible. This inclination, which is objectively disordered, constitutes for most of them a trial. They must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided. These persons are called to fulfill God’s will in their lives and, if they are Christians, to unite to the sacrifice of the Lord’s Cross the difficulties they may encounter from their condition.
  • §2359 Homosexual persons are called to chastity. By the virtues of self-mastery that teach them inner freedom, at times by the support of disinterested friendship, by prayer and sacramental grace, they can and should gradually and resolutely approach Christian perfection.
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How not to sell Philadelphia!

I almost ignored this one, but I just can’t: the photo is just too, too funny!

Philly transplants have over $150,000 more to spend on homes than locals — and it’s driving up home prices

The migration of home buyers from more expensive cities to Philadelphia helps drive up prices across the market.

by Michaelle Bond | Thursday, August 4, 2022

For-sale sign outside a home in the Frankford section of Philadelphia in December 2021. The average person moving into Philadelphia has more money to spend on a house than a Philadelphian does, according to a Redfin analysis. | Alejandro A Alverez, Philadelphia Inquirer staff photographer. Click to enlarge.

Philadelphia may be an affordable big city compared to others on the East Coast and across the country — a draw for new residents — but that’s little comfort to locals who have watched prices rise.In the first half of 2022, people looking to move into Philadelphia searched for houses with a maximum price of $588,000 on average, according to the online brokerage Redfin’s analysis of searches on its website. Locals capped their searches much lower at $422,000.

As home prices continue to climb, people moving largely from more expensive cities have an advantage with an average of 39% more to spend. That, in turn, helps push up prices across the market.

There’s much more at the original.

I do not normally reproduce photos from The Philadelphia Inquirer, but this one struck me as hysterically funny. A reasonably well-researched article about how prices in Philly are lower than in places like New York City and the left coast, the Inky illustrated it with a photo of a home for sale, in which the property owners had effectively put themselves in jail, installing metal bars and a door on the front porch of their rowhome in the Frankford neighborhood, to keep the bad guys out of their property. I have noted this in some bad Philadelphia areas several times.

From The Philadelphia Inquirer, September 16, 2021. Click to enlarge.

In an article noting that there are 57 city blocks where 10 or more people have been shot since 2015, the Inquirer included a graph showing the Kensington area as the worst, Frankford is also included as a not-so-great place. I do not know if the article author, Michaelle Bond, “an urbanism writer covering how people live in their homes, how the market directs choices, and how policies shape communities,” is the one who selected the photo with the article, but whoever picked it could not have done a much better job of turning off people on the idea of moving to the City of Brotherly Love.

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Killadelphia! Philly is now ahead of last year's record pace, but the Inquirer hasn't noticed.

This is no surprise; we all knew it was coming. With three homicides in the City of Brotherly Love yesterday, Philadelphia has now moved slightly ahead of the pace of murders in 2021, the year which set the city’s annual record of 562.

This is something that you would think that The Philadelphia Inquirer, our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, would have noticed, but at least as of 12:57 PM EDT, there is nothing on either the newspaper’s website main page or separate crime page. Nighttime reporter Robert Moran noticed two of the killings, but was apparently working solely from Philadelphia Police Department press releases:

2 dead in separate Philly shootings

A 29-year-old woman and a 30-year-old man were gunned down Tuesday night.

by Robert Moran | Tuesday, August 2, 2022

A 29-year-old woman and a 30-year-old man were fatally wounded in separate shootings Tuesday night in Philadelphia, police said.

Just before 8:15 p.m., the woman was outside on the 1800 block of Harrison Street in East Frankford when she was shot once in the left side of her back. Police rushed her to Temple University Hospital, where she was pronounced dead at 8:33.

Around 7:30 p.m., the man was outside on the 5400 block of Pearl Street in West Philadelphia when he was shot several times in the chest, police said. He was taken by private vehicle to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead at 7:44.

Police reported no immediate arrests or other details in either case.

So far this year, there were 319 homicides in Philadelphia as of late Monday night. There were 321 for the same time last year, which the city ended with an all-time record 562 homicides.

So, Mr Moran did notice that the city was very possibly approaching tying or exceeding last year’s homicide totals. Possibly he didn’t have access to last year’s totals for August 2nd, and didn’t realize that two homicides would tie it. And possibly he didn’t have the information that not two, but three separate homicides had occurred, all by gunfire, but Fox 29’s Steve Keeley had. Mr Moran did have the police press releases on the two homicides he listed, but, following the Inquirer’s guidelines,[1]I do not have a copy of those guidelines, but have inferred that they exist due to the constant scrubbing of references to race in the Inquirer’s reporting, something which was not the case in … Continue reading he scrubbed the race of the police reports of both the slain woman and man.

Such is the journolism[2]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading of what I have occasionally called The Philadelphia Enquirer.[3]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. I have twice noted begging letters from the Lenfest Institute, which owns the Inky, asking for donations from subscribers above and beyond their subscriptions. Perhaps if the Inquirer’s reporting matched their history, I’d send something.

References

References
↑1 I do not have a copy of those guidelines, but have inferred that they exist due to the constant scrubbing of references to race in the Inquirer’s reporting, something which was not the case in previous years. And race is not the only thing that the Inky censors.
↑2 The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
↑3 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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Killadelphia Sixty killings in Philly in July, but hey, the real problem is monkeypox!

According to the Philadelphia Police Department, there have been 317 homicides in the City of Brotherly Love as of 11:59 PM EDT on Sunday, July 31st. With a recorded 257 murders as of the end of June, that means that 60 dead bodies littered Philly’s mean streets just in July, topping the 48 killed in June and 54 murdered in May, making July the city’s deadliest month so far.

But there’s more. We had previously noted that, in 2021, there had been a decrease in the homicide rate in Philly, beginning July 9th. July 2021 saw 48 murders in the city.

As of June 30th, there had been 257 homicides in the city, 5.17% fewer than the 271 on the same day in 2021. At the end of July, those 317 homicides are only 0.63% fewer than the 319 last year. At least so far, last year’s ‘lull’ has not shown up. Rather, it seems as though the gang-bangers and wannabes are trying to make up for lost time.

As of the end of July in 2021, there had been 1,356 recorded shootings in Philly; compared to 1388 this year.

Philadelphia is not a monolith. Heavily segregated, much of the violence has been restricted to five dozen blocks. As Robert Stacy McCain has noted, not all neighborhoods are created equal, and if you’re white and live in Rittenhouse Square or Society Hill, you don’t have nearly as much about which to worry.

But, hey, the real problem is Monkeypox!

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And here you have all of the information that you need to understand the violence in Philadelphia!

I hadn’t expected this, though I suppose that I should have.

We have previously noted the murder of 73-year-old James “Simmie” Lambert by a group of Philadelphia teens and even younger brats. What I didn’t mention on this site was that the 13-year-old girl who was questioned but not arrested was herself shot in a not very nice neighborhood, the 5800 block of Osceola Street.

Well, it seems like the ‘hood doesn’t like that some of the kids who beat Mr Lambert to death have been criminally charged:

Family of 73-year-old man fatally beaten with traffic cone says they’re being harassed, judge issues stay away order

On three occasions in the last two weeks, a group of kids has gathered outside the home of the 84-year-old sister of James Lambert Jr.

by Ellie Rushing | Wednesday, July 27, 2022

The family of the 73-year-old man who was fatally beaten by teens with a traffic cone last month said they have been harassed and taunted by kids showing up outside their house in recent weeks.

On three occasions in the last two weeks, a group of kids has gathered outside the home of the 84-year-old sister of James Lambert Jr., who died last month after two teens hit him multiple times with a traffic cone.

Tania Stephens, Lambert’s niece, said the kids stood outside her mother’s Strawberry Mansion house, pointing and laughing, making the family feel intimidated and harassed.

In response, Philadelphia Municipal Court Judge Joffie C. Pittman III on Tuesday approved a stay-away order requested by the District Attorney’s Office, ordering all defendants, their families, and any third parties related to them to stand down or face arrest.

Yeah, that’s going to make a difference!

According to Lonny Fish, the lawyer representing Gamara Mosley, one of the two 14-year-olds charged with third-degree murder in the case, some of the girls photographed outside the home are believed to be sisters of a 13-year-old girl who was present during the incident, but was not charged with any crimes. It is their understanding, Fish said, that the kids had been on their way to the pool nearby and stopped by the house spontaneously.

Would that be the same 13-year-old girl who was shot on Osceola Street? Osceola Street is about four miles from the Strawberry Mansion section of Philly, and a bit more than five miles from Cecil B Moore and 21st Street, where Mr Lambert was murdered.

Makes me wonder: were any of these girls on the way to the pool the same girls whose violence and vandalism caused the city to close the pool at McVeigh Recreation Center for the summer? Granted, it’s about 3 miles from McVeigh to Strawberry Mansion, but certainly not a distance that healthy teenaged girls couldn’t walk.

The girls were friends of Mosley’s up until her arrest, he said, but Mosley’s family has nothing to do with the visits to Lambert’s relatives’ home, which he called “indefensible” and wrong.

“My client is 14, and she’s incarcerated right now,” Fish said. “Whatever it is, it’s not at the behest of any of the people supervising my client.”

It may well be that young Miss Mosley and her family had nothing to do with the harassment of the Lambert family, because they’d certainly be stupid to do anything like this and jeopardize the inevitable request by her mouthpiece to transfer the charges to the juvenile justice system. Then again, there’s not a lot of evidence that there’s much intelligence in a family that let Miss Mosley out playing in the streets at 2:30 in the morning.

Some of my Philly friends are just shaking their heads at the violence happening in the City of Brotherly Love, but the story from The Philadelphia Inquirer really tells you all that you need to know: too many people are on the side of the criminals and juvenile delinquents! That’s how District Attorney Larry Krasner, who’d rather keep the bad guys on the streets than behind bars, got elected and then re-elected, and that’s how he’ll get re-elected again in 2025 if he chooses to run again.

Philly has more than just bad adults; the city has horrible mothers and fathers — if the fathers are even around — rearing children who are delinquents because they want to be delinquents, because they think it’s just so cool to be gangsters and wannabes. No government programs will ever help when the kids are subjected to rotten parents from the beginning.

I have told everybody what is needed to solve the city’s problems, but it’s just way, way, way too politically incorrect for anyone to consider.

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How does Joe Biden not realize how ridiculous this is?

Remember how getting rid of the evil Donald Trump and putting the adult Joe Biden in charge would greatly lift respect for the United States abroad?

Russia ridicules Biden’s trans and non-binary appointees

“Keep going that way, our dear American ex-partners!” urged Russia’s UN ambassador in response to a photo of Levine and Brinton

by Madeleine Hubbard | Sunday, July 17, 2022 | 7:06 PM EDT

Russia is ridiculing transgender Assistant Health Secretary Rachel Levine and non-binary Deputy Assistant Nuclear Energy Secretary Sam Brinton, after a photo of the queer duo at the French ambassador’s home went viral last week.

Russian Foreign Affairs communications official Maria Zakharova posted a photo on Telegram of Brinton and Levine in heels and skirts at the party with the caption as translated: “Answer the question honestly for yourself: Are these the values that you are ready to instill in your children? Or do we still fight for our own?”

Russia’s United Nations diplomat Dmitry Polyanskiy also reposted a photo of Levine and Brinton with the caption: “Keep going that way, our dear American ex-partners! I don’t think we even need any long-term strategies to counter your malicious role in the world – you are doing the right thing yourselves! And let the whole world see WhoYouAre!”

Brinton, became the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition in the Office of Nuclear Energy in the Department of Energy in June, posted the original photo with Levine on Instagram. The account has since been made private, but many screenshots of the photo are circulating online.

Brinton has a controversial personal life, as reported by Just the News in February. In his free time, Brinton is a gender-fluid LGBT+ activist, a drag queen and a “pup” fetishist.

If I have used a non-‘credentialed’ media source for this article, it is because The New York Times and The Washington Post, supposedly our ‘newspapers of record’, are ignoring this story completely.

I have to admit it: I did not know what a “pup” fetishist is, and had to look it up. Now, the distinguished Mr Brinton, who is a drag queen and apparently likes to play like a puppy has received a Top Secret Q Clearance.

In the September 2, 2015 issue of the Advocate, a homosexual rights advocacy site, Mr Brinton defended Rentboy, a homosexual prostitution referral site. Yet this man male now has access to a great deal of our country’s top secret nuclear information. This is putting the adults in charge?

The ludicrousness of this situation was revealed when Mr Brinton chose to appear in drag at the home of the French ambassador for Bastille Day. He could have gone dressed normally, but no, he had to use his appearance to look as ridiculous as he possibly could, which means that either:

  • He doesn’t realize that appearing in public in drag makes him look ridiculous; or
  • He is more concerned with pushing the homosexual, transgender and ‘non-binary’ political agenda than he is with his very important and serious job.

Those two things are not mutually exclusive; both could be true, and both probably are true.

And Richard Levine?[1]In accordance with our Stylebook, The First Street Journal uses the real, proper names of those claiming to be ‘transgender,’ meaning the names and pronouns appropriate to their … Continue reading This dumpy man male would disgrace even a man’s military uniform, he’s so horribly out-of-shape, but wearing a woman’s military uniform makes him look even more ridiculous. While Dr Levine’s position isn’t a military one, he is the commander of the Commissioned Corps of the United States Public Health Service, and it’s worth noting that any military officer in Dr Levine’s physical shape — even disregarding him being ‘transgender’ — would be told to shape up or ship out. Either as the male that he is, or the woman he claims to be, he is just a disgrace to a military uniform.

But, you know what? This may well be a good thing. The more the weirdos try to normalize their idiocy, the more that normal people are going to realize just how stupid and clownish all of their agenda is. It’s one thing to say, OK, we’re going to just be polite and call Richard Levine ‘Rachel,’ and let Sam Brinton use ‘they/them’ pronouns — though actually reading an article in which the plural pronouns are used to refer to a single individual is mentally jarring and just comes across as wrong — but the more they present themselves in public like this, the more that normal people are going to rebel. As even liberal but normal parents are having problems with the homosexual and transgender agenda being pushed on their children, and the homosexual and transgender advocacy groups become more extreme in their pushing, the more that we can hope that those people will be marginalizing themselves.

President Biden is an elderly man, one who grew up in a normal, Catholic household, someone who sees himself as a devout Catholic, even if he’s gone totally in on the pro-abortion agenda, and even he can’t possibly see this as normal, even he can’t possibly not be embarrassed by the actions of his subordinates. It’s one thing to have an openly homosexual Secretary of Transportation in Pete Buttigieg, but at least the Secretary tries to look normal, rather than like a clown. There is at least reasonable hope that Mr Buttigieg can and will do his job without his homosexuality taking over everything, without him pushing his sexuality on everyone he meets.

But it’s something entirely different to have people like Dr Levine and Mr Brinton in high office, with their entire self-presentation pushing their weird sexuality on everyone they meet. What normal person could take Dr Levine and Mr Brinton seriously?

References

References
↑1 In accordance with our Stylebook, The First Street Journal uses the real, proper names of those claiming to be ‘transgender,’ meaning the names and pronouns appropriate to their biological sex and names given by their parents.