Category Archives: Culture

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Killadelphia: Not as bad as last year!

January is over, and we have the final numbers from the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page: the city officially admits to 30 homicides for January, a major improvement over January of the previous three years. If the current rate of killings is maintained throughout the year, that would put Philly on track for 353 murders for 2023.

However, the website Broad + Liberty, following its exposé concerning how the official numbers have dramatically undercounted killings, has a different number. Broad + Liberty has been keeping a running track of homicides and suspicious deaths in the City of Brotherly Love, including documenting with official police press releases.

B + L have counted 33 homicides, plus one suspicious death. Yeah, that’s still significantly lower than the last three years, but it’s 10% higher than the city admits.

As always, there’s more. The city’s official shooting victims database has documented 141 shootings in January. That’s an improvement over January of 2022, in which the same site recorded 166 shootings, a 15.06 decline in shootings, which is a far lower decline than the 31.82% decline in the official homicide numbers. Either the city is getting better at keeping people who have been wounded by gunfire from dying, or the gang-bangers have become even worse shots than usual; both could be true.

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The Philadelphia Inquirer really, really, really hates the police!

We have noted previously that The Philadelphia Inquirer declines to publish the photographs of people accused of crimes. But when the accused are cops, even cops against whom police-hating District Attorney Larry Krasner cannot get convictions? Yup, the Inquirer will publish their photos!

Former Philly cop Carl Holmes’ sexual assault case has been tossed out of court

Prosecutors moved to withdraw charges after saying they’d been unable to get a key witness to appear at Holmes’ trial.

by Chris Palmer | Tuesday, January 31, 2023 | 1:59 PM EST

The criminal case against former Philadelphia Police commander Carl Holmes, who had been accused of sexually assaulting women at work, effectively collapsed Tuesday when a key accuser failed to show up to testify at trial.

The photo to the right is actually a screenshot from the Inquirer story, including the newspaper’s caption. I included it this was as documentation that yes, it was in there. The Inky’s image is linked here, and you can click on the photo to enlarge it.

We noted last October how the newspaper had published photos of former law enforcement officers accused of crimes.

Assistant District Attorney Clarke Beljean said at a brief hearing that prosecutors and detectives had taken extensive steps in recent days to find the witness and persuade her to come to court. They’d even asked a judge to issue a bench warrant Monday, when the trial had been scheduled to begin.

But none of those efforts was successful. And without the woman’s testimony, Beljean said, “I cannot put on a case.”

The charges connected to that witness — Michele Vandegrift, who said Holmes sexually assaulted her in his office in 2007 — were the only offenses still standing against Holmes, who had been charged in 2019 with assaulting two other subordinates. The cases connected to those witnesses had already fallen apart in court due to questions about their credibility or availability to testify.

Holmes, 57, who has denied the allegations, showed little reaction as prosecutors moved to withdraw the latest charges. He and his lawyer, Gregory Pagano, declined to comment as they left the courtroom.

Further down:

Holmes was once one of the Police Department’s highest-ranking commanders, a chief inspector who spent nearly three decades on the force and was also a lawyer. But during his career, he had been publicly accused of sexually assaulting women he worked with — allegations detailed extensively by The Inquirer and the Daily News.

Note how that’s phrased: article author Chris Palmer has written it in a way to imply that yes, Mr Holmes is guilty, guilty, guilty, the newspaper has documented it, and that the only problem is that witnesses won’t cooperate. Common Pleas Court Judge Shanese Johnson told the prosecutors, “She’s no longer interested in being part of this case. She’s ducking you.”

When I tried the story’s internal link, several times around 3:20 PM EST, I kept getting “Internal server error.”

In 2019, District Attorney Larry Krasner’s office accused Holmes of crimes including attempted sexual assault and indecent assault following a grand jury investigation. At the time, Krasner said he believed the investigation showed that powerful men in the Police Department had operated with “impunity,” particularly if they were accused of wrongdoing by women. But Krasner said his office would not shy away from prosecuting cases even if he believed they had been “mishandled” in the past.

And here the Inquirer shows us how much they love Mr Krasner — they endorsed him for re-election in 2021 — and how they love the George Soros-sponsored defense attorney who is now District Attorney’s attacks on the police.

There’s a significant amount of information in the original about how the purported witnesses have refused to come forward.

But there’s more in today’s Inquirer to show how much the editors hate the police:

Without systemic change, police killings will continue | Editorial

Political leaders and police departments should be able to balance the need to combat crime with the need to address racial inequality.

by The Editorial Board | Tuesday, January 31, 2023 | 5:00 AM EST

The sickening video of Tyre Nichols being beaten to death by five Memphis, Tenn., police officers is yet another reminder of how departments across the country have failed to address systemic police brutality.

From George Floyd to Freddie Gray to Michael Brown to Eric Garner, and every harrowing death in between, we have been here before. We have heard the cries for help, from “I can’t breathe” to “I’m just trying to go home,” and we have watched the videos of cold-blooded murder by cops, often over minor incidents.

Each time, there is a call for police reform. Each time, nothing seems to change.

Perhaps even more horrifying is that for every recorded spectacle of a senseless killing, hundreds of other murders at the hands of police go unnoticed. Police officers shot and killed a record 1,096 people in 2022, according to a database maintained by the Washington Post.

More than 1,096 people were murdered in 2022 in Chicago and Philadelphia alone, but the editors of the Inquirer don’t seem to care much about them. The newspaper rarely reports much at all about the killings in Philly, and almost never tells readers about arrests or convictions of killers unless the killings were somehow more noticeable than usual, such as the Roxborough High School shooting. We have detailed, many times, how the newspaper scrubs the race of both victims and accused criminals from the stories they do cover.

The editorial, which reads like it was written by the Inky’s most wild-eyed ‘progressive’ columnist, Will Bunch, continued:

There is some cautious optimism in seeing the five Memphis police officers fired and charged with second-degree murder and other crimes. But would the justice have been as swift if the officers were white?

Given that Mr Bunch the Editorial Board mentioned, further down, the George Floyd case in Minneapolis, it’s obvious that they do know that white police officers have been charged, tried, and convicted previously, so why the snarky bit of race-baiting?

There is no denying the racially biased culture that is embedded in policing. It goes without saying that the disproportionate number of people killed by police are Black.

What the editorial does not note is that a “disproportionate number” of criminals are black.

While the calls to “defund the police” may have been ill-phrased, the need to reevaluate and possibly redirect law enforcement funding hasn’t gone away. However, a pandemic-driven rise in shootings and crimes — along with Republican attacks — led to pushback. As public opinion shifted, so did the political will to address systemic racial inequality.

In the end, funding actually increased in most police departments, including in Philadelphia. In fact, with shootings and murders near records, none of the candidates in the upcoming mayoral primary has proposed to reduce police funding.

Yeah, the political moves to try to ‘defund the police’ mostly went nowhere, certainly not in Philadelphia where officially reported homicides jumped from 356 to 499 in 2020, and them up to 562 in 2021. The public responded with a huge surge in applications to carry firearms, because they saw the Wild West show into which the City of Brotherly Love had descended. And while the Philadelphia Police Department didn’t see a formal reduction in funding, the fact that Philadelphia is nearly 600 officers undermanned from its authorized full strength of 6,380, with around 800 more expected to retire within the next four years means that the Police Department has been defunded in a de facto sense.

The embedded link is to an Inquirer story; the editors already knew about the short staffing.

(M)ore departments need to increase de-escalation training and require fellow officers to intervene to stop abuse and report excess force.

This was perhaps the funniest part of all, because in his own column, Mr Bunch wrote:

Honor Tyre Nichols: Stop ATL’s dumb ‘Cop City’

Atlanta’s $90M project destroying a forest to train repressive cops needs to die

by Will Bunch | Tuesday, January 31, 2023

The lead story on CNN and other news outlets on Monday morning — after a weekend in which America struggled to process the utter senselessness of a Memphis cop beating that killed 29-year-old Tyre Nichols, an unarmed Black man — was that calls for “police reform” are again accelerating.

The headline struck me as — to use a phrase that normally makes me cringe — “fake news.” Those calls had been much louder and more forceful after a Minneapolis cop murdered George Floyd in 2020, and yet only a scattered hodgepodge of local-level reforms have even been attempted. Talk that President Joe Biden and Congress will revive a stalled federal bill to curb police brutality crashes into the blue wall of an inevitable filibuster by Senate Republicans. The nation’s weariness was reflected last weekend in relatively small protests, compared to the millions who marched nearly three years ago.

Yes, all of that boldface is in Mr Bunch’s original. I left it in to provide a greater example of the childishness of his writing.

Is it wrong of me to suspect that the distinguished Mr Bunch regrets that the “relatively small protests” this past weekend were small and peaceful, as opposed to the 2020 riots with their arson and destruction? Of course, the Inky fired forced the resignation of Executive Editor and Senior Vice President Stan Wischnowski over the headline “Buildings Matter, Too” on an article lamenting the destruction of property by the rioters in Philly, so maybe the #woke there — at least the ones left at that dying newspaper — do want another summer of fire and hate.

But if American leaders are serious in claiming that things are truly going to be different this time — that we are finally going to begin dismantling a deeply entrenched and militarized police-state culture that is drenched in white supremacy and treats Black and brown communities like occupation zones — then I know exactly where this project can start.

In the city that gave the world Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — Atlanta, Georgia.

There, of all places, law-enforcement leaders backed by the business and political establishment are using brute force and now demagogic false claims of “domestic terrorism” to impose a $90 million monument to everything that is wrong about police culture in America: a massive training center that will scar a vital urban forest with a mock city where cops will learn to put down unrest after the inevitable next Tyre Nichols or George Floyd.

The source cited by Mr Bunch in his embedded link under “domestic terrorism” states that, “One man was fatally shot by police in the confrontation after he opened fire and wounded a state trooper, authorities said.”

Wouldn’t a police training center include the lessons of the George Floyd and Tyre Nichols incidents? Wouldn’t trainers be stressing that when force is needed, it must be the minimum force required to make an arrest, and to de-escalate situations so that officers will not face criminal charges?

Well, not to Mr Bunch, given his “train repressive cops” secondary title.

But the rot of the Cop City plan runs deeper than the repeating history of Riotsville or the facility’s location near the former site of the Old Atlanta Prison Farm, which was marred during its 20th-century run by racialized violence. Indeed, the plan for Cop City almost reads as if that new ChatGPT AI tool was asked to “describe a project that epitomizes everything wrong with modern America,” since it seeks to train Atlanta’s militarized police force at a facility that would take down irreplaceable forest wetlands that protect against climate change.

It would be wiser if Mr Bunch actually checked his sources. When your source is Teen Vogua, a real journalist — as opposed to a journolist[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 — would check other sources.[2]One reason I use primarily credentialed media sources which run to the liberal side of the political spectrum is so that what I write can’t be criticized as stemming from evil reich-wing … Continue reading

“(V)ital urban forest”? “(I)rreplaceable forest wetlands”, huh? Robert Stacy McCain is a native of Atlanta, and knows something about the Peachtree State:

Being a native of Atlanta, let me tell you something about Georgia, in case you’re not familiar with the area. It’s hot and humid, which means that all manner of plant life grows with astonishing rapidity there. The house where I grew up in Douglas County had a chain-link fence around the backyard, and every summer one of my chores was to go out and cut the honeysuckle vines off that fence. If you didn’t cut those vines off — and it was tedious work, trust me — the whole fence would be covered in vines. The ditch down by the road? Oh, the hours spent with a slingblade cuttting back the brush and briars that sprang up relentlessly there! And the pine forest up the hill across the road? Oh, just 40 or 50 years earlier, that had all been farmland, until the bottom fell out of the cotton market. Stop farming your property for just a few years, and next thing you know, what used to be a pasture becomes a tangled forest — and that, my friends, is what happened to the old Atlanta Prison Farm.

A sling blade.

Reckon all those out-of-town hippies camping out in what they’ve dubbed “The Atlanta Forest” never handled a slingblade in their whole lives, and they sure as hell don’t realize that this “forest” only dates back to the 1960s or so, when the inmates stopped cultivating the property. Now it’s a tangled mess of briars and vines and oaks and pines and, if you’re a damned tree-hugging fool from Pittsburgh or someplace, maybe it seems like a South American rain forest or something, but it’s just what happens to any property in Georgia that’s gone untended for a while.

Not just Georgia; it happens in eastern Kentucky as well. I see it all around me. Mr McCain included that picture of the area, and it’s more weeded and tangled than a forest. But Mr Bunch has never been able to see the trees because the ‘forest’ is in the way.

References

References
↑1 The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
↑2 One reason I use primarily credentialed media sources which run to the liberal side of the political spectrum is so that what I write can’t be criticized as stemming from evil reich-wing conservatives.
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Philly’s Mother of the Year Has The Philadelphia Inquirer finally admitted that there are gangs in the city?

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

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

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

Well, perhaps the journolists[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 at the Inky got tired of being mocked; I know that I wasn’t the only one doing it!

A Southwest Philly street gang burglarized three gun stores, stealing nearly 100 guns, DA says

Members of 54th Street targeted gun stores in the suburbs, prosecutors said Wednesday, committing overnight, smash-and-grab burglaries that put guns in the hands of criminals.

by Vinny Vella | Thursday, January 25, 2023

Investigators in Montgomery County dismantled a Philadelphia street gang that they say burglarized a series of suburban gun stores in the fall, stealing 93 firearms that they used in shootings in the city or sold to other criminals. One of the guns, prosecutors said, was used in the murder of a 16-year-old.

OK, reporter Vinny Vella gets a point for using the word “gang,” but he loses a point for using the horrible, made-up word “burglarized,” which has, sadly, come into the dictionary, when the proper word is “burgled.”

In a sweeping affidavit of probable cause released Wednesday, prosecutors outlined the investigation of 54th Street, a gang active in Southwest Philadelphia. The group, mostly teens, wielded guns openly on social media and in music videos of rap songs in which they bragged about killing their rivals and terrorizing their neighborhoods, according to the document.Two adults and 11 juveniles were charged in the investigation, but only four were named in the affidavit: Angel Mason, 40, Elijah Terrell, 16, Donte Purnell, 22, and Liv Hall, 18. The nine other suspects, between the ages of 14 and 17, have been charged in juvenile court and were not publicly identified.

All have been charged with operating a corrupt organization, conspiracy, gun violations, and related offenses.

Elijah Terrell, photo via Steve Keeley, Fox 29 News.

Hmmm, young Miss Hall looks like she never expected to get into this kind of trouble! The Inky, of course, did not include her photo, but Fox 29 News did.

But she’s 18-years-old, legally an adult, and she (allegedly) took a stupid decision to join in burgling a gun store. They whooped and partied and made some good bucks last fall, but now someone is stone-cold graveyard dead, shot by one of the guns the 54th Street clique of young men, and apparently women as well, (allegedly) stole, and since the burglary occurred in Montgomery County and not Philadelphia, Let ’em Loose Larry Krasner won’t be able to cut her any sweetheart plea bargain.

None of the attorneys representing the four charged as adults had any comments concerning the cases. Mr Vella wrote that he found no indication that two of the defendants had yet hired lawyers.

According to Montgomery County District Attorney Kevin Steele, only 33 of the stolen guns have been recovered. That means that sixty of the stolen firearms are still out there, almost certainly in the hands of other criminals. Perhaps, just perhaps, the gun control laws the editors of the Inquirer say that Philly ought to be able to enact on the city’s own authority wouldn’t do anything at all to have stopped a few dozen bad guys from obtaining the firearms they wanted.

Donte Purnell, photos via Steve Keeley, Fox 29 News.

The first burglary was committed on September 24, 2022, when Miss Hall and four of the charged juveniles broke into Founding Fathers Outfitters in Springfield Township, getting away with 26 handguns, only six of which have been recovered.

Angel Mason would be my nominee for Mother of the Year in foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy, Philadelphia. It seems that 16-year-old Elijah Terrell, her son, (allegedly) attempted to rob a man at gunpoint in Southwest Philly, but was thwarted when his intended victim drew his own weapon and shot Mr Terrell. After that, our Mother of the Year candidate supposedly called 22-year-old Donte Purnell, who is also her son, to tell him to get the stolen weapons out of their home before detectives arrived with a search warrant.

There comes a point at which it’s difficult to believe that anything else in Philly could surprise you, and then you read a story like this. Apparently there’s really no bottom to the decadence in the City of Brotherly Love. Liv Hall, the fourth suspect pictured? She was caught when she (allegedly) used one of the weapons from the first burglary to shoot at her brother during an argument outside of their home.

These people were caught not so much because they are evil but because they are just boneheadedly stupid. Who knows, Miss Mason might be the leader of this gang, but a criminal mastermind she isn’t.

References

References
↑1 RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt.
↑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.
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Killadelphia: Lies, damned lies, and statistics

Broad + Liberty’s Philadelphia Homicide Tracker noted that the dead body found on January 23rd was not classified as a homicide by the Philadelphia Police Department, although the website did not tell us how the police did categorize it. And there was no change in the PPD’s Current Crime Statistics page to indicate that it was a homicide.

But here’s the PPD’s press release on the discovery of the body, which was Broad + Liberty’s information source:

Death Investigation:

39th district .. Stabbing –3xx Hansberry Street inside at 11:50 AM  a 25-year-old black male was stabbed to the right side of his neck, under his chin. The male was pronounced (dead) on location at 11:52 AM by Medic 28. Scene held, no weapon recovered, no arrest made.

Now, I don’t know about you, but the fact that someone died from being stabbed in the neck, under his chin, and the fact that the knife was not found on the scene, sure makes that seem like a homicide to me! Broad + Liberty obviously thinks so, as would anyone with an IQ higher than Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw’s, but the Philadelphia Police Department can’t quite seem to say that’s what it is.

There are things which could make it not legally a homicide: if it was a killing in self-defense, it’s not considered a homicide under the law. A suicide is also not considered a homicide under the law, but this was no suicide, because the knife disappeared.

It would make more sense to list this as a homicide, and if it turns out to be a self-defense case, remove it from the homicide report later. As it is, it looks like Commissioner Outlaw’s minions are trying to keep the numbers down artificially.

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Being taught about white privilege, by The Philadelphia Inquirer I don't think that the newspaper realizes just what it's doing

I have used this article title twice previously, as The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote major stories on the murder of Samuel Sean Collington, a Temple University student approaching graduation. Mr Collington was a white victim, allegedly murdered by a black juvenile in a botched robbery. On December 2, 2021,the Inquirer published 14 photographs from a vigil for Mr Collington, along with another story about him. Five separate stories about the case of a murdered white guy. In September of last year, what I have frequently called The Philadelphia Enquirer[1]RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt. published another big story about another white recent college grad, Everett Beauregard, murdered after an attempted robbery.

When it comes to the black victims of homicide, the Inky tells us little, because so many of the black victims have been thugs themselves. As we reported on Wednesday, the newspaper deliberately deletes information on the race of victims, because the #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 editors and staff think it will somehow be racist to do so. Yet the published stories, while they didn’t mention that Messrs Collington and Beauregard were white, published their photos, so the readers knew that they were.

And here they go again!

St. Joe’s beefed up its security after a shooting, home invasions, and assaults, but critics say it’s not enough

The number of aggravated assaults, robberies with a firearm, and thefts have increased near its main campus, and at a higher rate than the city as a whole, according to an analysis of police data.

by Susan Snyder and Chris A. Williams | Thursday, January 19, 2023 | 5:00 AM EST

The night before St. Joe’s student Tommy McBride was scheduled to serve as a coordinator at freshman orientation, he arrived at his home just four blocks from campus in Philadelphia’s Overbrook section.

“I was in my car sending a message to the leader team, telling everyone to get a good night’s rest and to get excited for the following day,” said the 21-year-old from Cherry Hill. “And as I was about to press send … a Dodge Charger pulls up right next to my car.”

Immediately, two males wearing ski masks and holding guns jumped out, pulled open his door, and dragged him out, he said. One of the gunmen fired into the air, then put a bullet in McBride’s knee.

While I do not like to use photos from the Enquirer Inquirer, I have included a screen capture of Mr McBride’s photo from the newspaper’s website — my subscription is digital only — to illustrate for readers how the newspaper, which never tells us explicitly that Mr McBride is white, lets us know anyway.

McBride never made freshman orientation that June week. He spent 12 weeks on crutches and still awaits another surgery. He and his college roommates left their house in the 2000 block of Upland Way and moved to nearby Manayunk.

“We all decided it was not safe physically and mentally to live there anymore,” he said, “especially with that not being the only incident of gun violence and crime” in the neighborhood.

Translation: Mr McBride and his roommates decided that they needed a safer, whiter neighborhood in Philly. Of course, adjacent Lower Merion was way too expensive!

I’ve done some work in Lower Merion, and I concluded that not only could I not afford a house there, I couldn’t even afford one of their driveways!

There is a long story about increasing crime incidents near St Joseph’s campus, but another illustration in the newspaper is worth more than a thousand words. You can click on the image to enlarge it. Another photo in the article, of the pleasant-looking street on which Mr McBride was shot, tells the reader how the criminal culture which has created the Philadelphia Badlands, a name the Inky hates, is moving into neighborhoods housing unarmed, unprotected, and naïve students around St Joseph’s and Drexel Universities.

In April of 2022, a survey by the Pew Charitable Trusts found that public safety was the most important issue concerning Philadelphians. The response of the editors? The Editorial Board told us that the real problem wasn’t crime and violence, but that white residents didn’t feel as threatened as “Black and Hispanic Philadelphians.”

Yet here, the newspaper is once again telling us about increasing crime and violence spreading to white residents. When it comes to crime, though the Inky has had some serious stories about how bad things are in Kensington, they are also telling us that things are getting worse in mostly white areas.

That the Editorial Board endorsed the George Soros-funded defense lawyer turned District Attorney, Let ’em Loose Larry Krasner, for re-election, tells us that they are not serious about fighting crime.

But maybe, just maybe, their story about crime creeping up in white areas will shake up the white, liberal voters in Chestnut Hill and Center City and Rittenhouse Square, and get them to consider that, just possibly, voting for the further left, the ‘progressive’ Democrats, in primary and general elections hasn’t worked out well for the city.

References

References
↑1 RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt.
↑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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They can’t handle the truth!

I ran across a photo if the masthead of The Philadelphia Inquirer from February 25, 1953, and noticed the ‘taglines’ that it used: “Public Ledger” and “An Independent Newspaper for All the People”. By Public ledger, the Inquirer was setting itself up as Philadelphia’s newspaper of record, which Wikipedia defines as “a major newspaper with large circulation whose editorial and news-gathering functions are considered authoritative.” That Wikipedia article named four newspapers of record for the United States: The New York Times (Founded 1851), The Washington Post (1877), The Los Angeles Times (1881) and The Wall Street Journal (1889). First printed on Monday, June 1, 1829, the then Pennsylvania Inquirer is older than any of them. “An editorial in the first issue of The Pennsylvania Inquirer promised that the paper would be devoted to the right of a minority to voice their opinion and ‘the maintenance of the rights and liberties of the people, equally against the abuses as the usurpation of power.’”

Boy has that changed! As has happened to other great newspapers, the newsroom of the Inquirer was captured by the young #woke, who forced the firing resignation of Executive Editor and Senior Vice President Stan Wischnowski over the headline Buildings Matter, Too.

“Devoted to the right of a minority to voice their opinion”? Yeah, that failed, too, in February of 2021, as the Inquirer closed comments on the majority of its articles, stating that:

Commenting on Inquirer.com was long ago hijacked by a small group of trolls who traffic in racism, misogyny, and homophobia. This group comprises a tiny fraction of the Inquirer.com audience. But its impact is disproportionate and enduring.

Really? How do they know? How can they be sure that these views do not represent more than a “tiny fraction” of their audience? Have they really done the research, or was it just that the #woke didn’t like the idea that the riff-raff could express their opinions? “An Independent Newspaper for All the People”? No, the Inquirer has now become a non-profit newspaper for the left.

However, the newspaper did leave commenting open on sports articles, and the Inky draws a fair number of them.

Marcus Hayes is a sports columnist for the Inquirer, one of some less than restrained opinions.

Ivan Provorov shuns LGBTQ+ community as Flyers miss a chance to make a difference on Pride night

Flyers coach John Tortorella should have benched the defenseman. Plain and simple.

by Marcus Hayes | Wednesday, January 18, 2023

Not long ago, John Tortorella would’ve benched a player for kneeling during the national anthem. These days, if you wear your homophobia like a Pride flag, you earn Tortorella’s respect.

More than a bit disingenuous, that. When Coach Tortorella made that statement, he was coaching the United States national hockey team, as they prepared to play in the 2016 World Cup of Hockey, an international tournament. That team was representing the United States, not just Philadelphia.

Oh, how far we’ve come.

There will be some who will equate that asking Ivan Provorov to skate in a Pride-themed jersey Tuesday night was like forcing him to kneel during the national anthem back in 2016. That’s ridiculous, of course.

Kneeling protested systemic racism aimed at Black men in the criminal justice system of the United States. Meanwhile, warming up in a jersey with rainbow numbers and nameplates simply supported the right of LGBTQ+ people all over the world to exist without persecution. For anyone, that’s pretty simple.

So, let’s not complicate the issue. Provorov refused to warm up Tuesday night against Anaheim because he does not support the right of LGBTQ+ people to even exist. He cites his devotion to the Russian Orthodox church; in his eyes, their life is a sin. About that: Patriarch Kirill, the church’s leader in Russia and reportedly a former KGB agent, in May justified Russia’s invasion of Ukraine because Ukraine allows Gay Pride parades, and if Russia and other homophobic states do not oppress LGBTQ+ persons, “then human civilization will end there.”

So, because Ivan Vladimirovich Provorov is a Russian Orthodox Christian, Mr Hayes states, pretty definitively, that Ivan Vladimirovich — who has the same patronymic name as Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin! — does not believe that homosexuals should even exist, because Patriarch Kirill believes that homosexual relations are a sin. A real journalist would have recognized that; a journolist[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 like Mr Hayes would not.

The source Mr Hayes linked does not say that Patriarch Kirill said that homosexuals have no right to exist. There is a difference between saying that something is a sin, and saying that those who engage in that sin have no right to exist.

Ahhh, but then again, Mr Hayes has never been particularly nuanced in his writing.

Though Mr Hayes is a sports columnist, writing about a particular sporting event, either Mr Hayes or one of the editors, decided that no, Mr Hayes column would not allow reader comments, not on this subject.

It’s hardly a surprise: the Inquirer did the same thing in January of 2022, when reader comments on an article about the University of Pennsylvania’s male swimmer Will Thomas, who declared that no, he was actually a female named “Lia”, were not supportive of that position, deleting all of the comments which didn’t accept the idea that Mr Thomas was actually a woman, and eventually closing comments entirely.

The Inquirer is our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, but still believes that the government should subsidize its reporters’ salaries, but does not believe that its readers, its taxpaying readers, should be able to express an opinion which might be critical of the homosexual or transgender agendas.

The truth is that the editors at the Inquirer know that acceptance of the abnormal ends of the sexual spectrum is not as universal as they believe it should be, and that yes, that “tiny fraction of the Inquirer.com audience” isn’t all that tiny, but that’s a truth that the editors just can’t handle.

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 The city counts 17 homicides, but Broad + Liberty has documented 20.

We had previously noted the decline in the homicide rate in the City of Brotherly Love that began last November, and that, as of the end of November, there was actually a margin-of-error chance that the city could finish with slightly under 500 ‘official’ homicides. It didn’t work out that way, and Philly finished 2022 with 516 ‘official’ homicides, though with the number of deaths classified as ‘suspicious’ rather than homicides, the real number could be much higher. Currently, the Philadelphia Police are reporting 17 homicides as of 11:59 PM EST on Tuesday, January 17th, but Broad + Liberty are reporting 20 through that time period. The Broad + Liberty site includes its sources, and every single one of them is documented with Police Department press releases.

Of the 21 homicides noted by Broad + Liberty — their update at 11:28 AM EST this morning includes a killing this morning — 14 of the victims, 12 males and 2 females, were black, six were Hispanic (all males), and there was one Asian male constituting the victims. This is the kind of information The Philadelphia Inquirer has, in that they receive the same press releases as Broad + Liberty, but they censor out of their news stories.

Two dead, one in critical condition after shooting breaks out at a Chinese restaurant in Southwest Philly

Police said the motive is unknown, but the victims all lived close to the restaurant where the shooting occurred.

by Beatrice Forman | Wednesday, January 18, 2023

Shangri-La Chinese food takeout, August 2019, via Google Maps.

Two people were killed and another was in critical condition after a shooting at a Chinese takeout restaurant in Southwest Philadelphia.Police told reporters at least 16 shots were fired at the Shangri-La restaurant on the 5400 block of Chester Avenue around 11:30 p.m. on Tuesday night as customers were picking up orders.

Philadelphia Police Chief Inspector Scott Small said officers found three unconscious victims on the floor of the takeout area when they arrived on the scene: a 19-year-old man, a 20-year-old man, and a 43-year-old woman. “All three victims were suffering from gunshot wounds,” Small said.

Police confirmed the 19-year-old man and the woman were pronounced dead at Penn Presbyterian Medical Center. The 20-year-old man is in critical condition.

While Broad + Liberty reported that the two who were killed were black, I had to find out from the city’s shooting victims database that the third victim, the 20-year-old male, was also black. I would have guessed that anyway, given that the Inquirer’s story said that the two men were brothers. While Inspector Small stated that the motive was unknown, or who were the intended targets, the shootings victims database indicated that the two men suffered multiple body wounds, including a head wound to the survivor, while the slain woman was struck in the shoulder. I’d note here that the database is a pain to use, and the three shooting victims from the same incident are not listed together, but on the fifth, seventh, and nineth lines of the database, as accessed at 1:40 PM EST.

It’s still early in the year, but the difference between 17 homicides and 20 is stark. Extrapolated over the full year, it’s a difference between 365 and 429 murders for 2023. With three more dead bodies documented in the city, the Philadelphia Police Department need to explain why three people who are stone-cold graveyard dead, three people who died from gunshot wounds according to Broad + Liberty’s statistics, don’t count as homicides.

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Nice guys will never solve Kensington’s problems Sometimes you just have to be an [insert slang term for the anus here] to get things done

The Editorial Board of The Philadelphia Inquirer is, since publisher Elizabeth ‘Lisa’ Hughes took over, and the firing resignation of Executive Editor Stan Wischnowski, has been the wokest of 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, so it’s rare for me to see them get something even half-right, but half right they got it:

It’s going to take more than $20 million to help the people of Kensington | Editorial

Without a comprehensive plan to clear the open-air drug markets and help those struggling with addiction and homelessness, the city will be throwing good money after bad.

by The Editorial Board | Sunday, January 15, 2023 | 5:00 AM EST

The city’s plan to steer millions of dollars to Kensington to combat the opioid crisis is a much-needed welcome start. But without a comprehensive plan to address the rampant open-air drug markets and homelessness lining the main business corridor there, the city will be throwing good money after bad.

Mayor Jim Kenney announced plans to distribute $20 million to community groups in Kensington to fund a variety of efforts, including overdose prevention, home repairs, and improvements to parks and schools.

The money is part of the $200 million Philadelphia expects to receive over 18 years as part of a national settlement with Johnson & Johnson and three drug distribution firms that helped fuel the opioid crisis.

Overall, Pennsylvania expects to receive $1.6 billion as part of the settlement negotiated by then-Attorney General (and now Gov.-elect) Josh Shapiro.

To their credit, Kenney and District Attorney Larry Krasner initially balked at the city’s portion of the settlement, given the scale of the opioid epidemic in Philadelphia, which has resulted in more than 1,100 deaths annually since 2017.

Philadelphia is ground zero in the state’s opioid crisis and should receive more funding. But the city ultimately went along with the settlement, figuring it was better than nothing.

The challenge now is to not waste the opportunity — or the money. For far too long, the city has allowed Kensington to devolve into an infamous drug bazaar.

That blurb above? That was in the online version of the editorial itself. It pretty much pegs the irony meter having the Editorial Board telling us about the “opioid crisis” and the Hellhole Kensington has become, and then link an OpEd which implores making illegal drug abuse safer!

As for the “infamous drug bazaar” mentioned? That’s a link to the Inky’s story about the Mexican government using videos of Kensington’s homeless and junkies in an ad campaign to scare Mexicans away from drug use!

The scene along the main business corridor is dystopian. Homeless encampments line the trash-strewn streets along with used needles, human feces, and vomit. There are scores of people smoking, drinking, sleeping, sitting, standing, and stumbling in different states of addiction.

Those unfamiliar with the jaw-dropping sight should google videos of Kensington, as words can’t capture the daily horror. It is an appalling and embarrassing blot on the city that no leader should accept.

Let’s tell the truth here: Mayor Jim Kenney has accepted it! Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw has accepted it. And District Attorney Larry Krasner has accepted it. Oh, they’ll never say that, not out loud, but the fact that they haven’t actually done anything about it speaks volumes.

I don’t particularly like copying photos from the Inquirer, but the one on the right, which you can click to enlarge, illustrates the problem, and I thought that photographer José Moreno captured it well. An unidentified junkie, passed out on litter-strewn Kensington Avenue, just a few steps from the SEPTA Market Street/Frankford rail line station, by security roll-down shutters marred by graffiti, with someone trying to see if he’s just passed out or maybe dead, while the police look on. Are the police doing anything about it? Has an ambulance been called?

Another photo can be found here.

Near the end of the editorial:

Past efforts to clamp down on drug dealing and homelessness have been successful, but short-lived. In 1998, then-Police Commissioner John Timoney launched Operation Sunrise, a major effort designed to retake control of Kensington’s streets.

In 2017, the city cleared a large heroin encampment that existed for years in a gulch along the Kensington rail line. In 2021, the city cleared two homeless encampments along Kensington Avenue.

Really? The Editorial Board could reference just three major efforts in twenty-five years? Well, perhaps there were more, and the newspaper simply didn’t have all of the information, or the Board believes that more links would make poorer prose. But I did notice that after a major story in the Inquirer on August 17, 2020, there’s no referenced story about the police making a major raid that year.

The Editorial Board noted that the l;aw abiding residents in Kensington want the police to “crack down” on the open air drug markets, on the crime and the homelessness, but one particular paragraph stands out:

“If the drug dealers are not here then the drug addicts won’t be here,” Darlene Burton, a Kensington resident and community activist, told the Editorial Board. “You have to cut off the head of the snake.”

The Board let that statement stand without challenge, but let’s tell the truth: as long as there are drug addicts, there will be people willing to sell drugs to them. And that is where all of the proposals to attach the dealers fail: the city needs to crack down on the addicts as well.

The addicts need to be arrested and charged for using illegal drugs, and they need to be kept locked up at least long enough for the drugs to get out of their systems, and go through detoxification. You can’t just offer the junkies drug rehabilitation, you have to get them through detox, and force them to go through rehab, or you are just wasting your time and money. You need to convict them of crimes, so that they can, at the very least, be put on probation with frequent, mandatory drug tests.

Why haven’t Mayor Kenney, Commissioner Outlaw, and District Attorney Krasner done anything about Kensington? Because, deep down, they know that what I wrote in the previous paragraph is necessary, and none of them are willing to invest the time or money or political capital to do that. But if the city doesn’t do that, doesn’t treat not only the drug dealers but the drug addicts seriously, then the current situation in Kensington will continue. Oh, a police action of sorts could move the junkies out every so often, but without taking care of the addicts, all that can be done is push them into Fairhill, Harrowgate, or Hunting Park.

The truth ought to be obvious: you can’t be a nice guy and solve the problems. Sometimes you just have to be an [insert slang term for the anus here].

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.
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If this isn’t #grooming, then what is it?

As we have previously noted, the Central Bucks School Board required teachers, administrators and staff to use students’ proper names, references and pronouns as recorded in school records, unless the individual student’s parents approved a change, and is removing materials with sexualized content from school libraries. Of course, the homosexual lobby are just spittle-flecked with rage, claiming that this discriminates against homosexual, bisexual, and ‘transgender’ students, as though normalizing and promoting homosexuality and ‘transgenderism’ is some sort of civil right, and not an attempt at grooming.

So now, the Biden Administration is getting into the act, wanting to advance grooming of abnormal sexual orientations. From The Washington Post:

Are book bans discrimination? Biden administration to test new legal theory.

The federal government is investigating a Texas school district over its alleged removal of books featuring LGBTQ characters

by Hannah Natanson | Friday the 13th, January 2023 | 6:00 AM EST

The federal government has opened an investigation into a Texas school district over its alleged removal of books featuring LGBTQ characters — marking the first test of a new legal argument that failing to represent students in school books can constitute discrimination.

The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights is investigating the Granbury Independent School District, department spokesman Jim Bradshaw said this month. The probe is based on a complaint of discrimination lodged last summer by the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, said ACLU attorney Chloe Kempf. Continue reading →