Category Archives: Culture

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Perhaps we should start telling the unvarnished truth instead of hiding behind euphemisms

It was with some amusement that I saw the screen blurb screen captured to the right in Wednesday morning’s Philadelphia Inquirer “Newsletters” section of their website main page.

When schools move ‘tough-to-teach’ kids | Morning Newsletter

by Paola Pérez | Wednesday, December 17, 2025 | 6:00 AM EST

It’s not unusual for students to switch schools after the school year begins. However, some Philly principals point to one “concerning” trend behind a bump in transfers from charters.

The Inquirer spoke with a dozen current and former district administrators who say some pupils with behavior problems are pushed by charters out to Philadelphia School District schools. Charter leaders dispute claims that kids are sent to district schools over disciplinary issues. . . . .

Deep frustration: The bar is much higher for district administrators to remove students; they “can’t turn kids away,” another principal said. Making matters more difficult is a lack of additional funding to attend to more students.

Notable quote: “It’s just not fair,” said a third principal. “We’re not getting their best kids.”

Reporter Paola Pérez newsletter referenced a larger Inquirer article:

It’s an open secret that some charter schools push out kids with behavioral problems, Philly principals say

Principals say students offloaded from charters to Philadelphia School District schools are often “counseled out,” while they can’t remove students from traditional public schools for those reasons.

by Kristen A Graham | Wednesday, December 17, 2025 | 5:00 AM EST | Updated 12:16 PM EST

The trickle begins in the fall, some principals say: Students with a history of behavior or disciplinary problems or other issues show up in Philadelphia School District schools, often from city charters.

“(A) history of behavior or disciplinary problems,” huh? Is that the 21st century formulation of what those of us from the quill-pen-and-inkwell era referred to as juvenile delinquents? At least it’s better than “tough to teach.”

“(N)ot getting their best kids”? Nope, the public schools are getting their worst kids!

But at times, it seems like some students are off-loaded from charters because they’re tough to educate, according to interviews with a dozen district administrators. In district schools, administrators can’t remove students for such issues.

We also used a term, “reform school,” which AI defined as:

A reform school, an outdated term for juvenile correctional or therapeutic facilities, housed troubled youths for behavior change through discipline, education, and vocational training, aiming to reform rather than just punish. Today, these institutions are typically called residential treatment centers, therapeutic boarding schools, or youth correctional facilities, focusing on mental health and specific behavioral issues with modern therapeutic approaches, though historical ones featured strict discipline, labor, and sometimes harsh conditions.

Maybe the name and ideas of reform schools are what’s needed. Instead of sending juvenile delinquents those youth with behavioral or disciplinary problems to regular public schools, perhaps we need to send them to old-fashioned reform schools, perhaps we need to get them and their disruptive-to-other-students behaviors away from normal kids.

But, like the kerfuffle over President Trump calling Minnesota Governor Tim Walz “seriously retarded,” you’re just not allowed to use the politically incorrect words, and “reform school” and “juvenile delinquent” are just as politically incorrect as “retard.” Perhaps, just perhaps, if we admit that the delinquents are delinquents, and put them in real reform schools, rather than warehousing them in mainstream public schools, the vast bulk of our students would wind up being better educated than they have been.

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Killadelphia: Crimes of absolute stupidity

It was a good day for law enforcement, and a bad day for bad guys. Tyvine Jones, the (alleged) hitman for the Blumberg gang was arrested without incident by Federal Marshals in Lansdowne:

A North Philly gang hit man, ‘the very worst’ of society, taken into custody for three killings, officials say

U.S. Marshals arrested Tyvine Jones early Wednesday in Lansdowne. Investigators say he is tied to three murders in the city.

by Vinny Vella | Wednesday, December 10, 2025 | 2:33 PM EST

A North Philadelphia street-gang hit man wanted in connection with three killings, including the execution-style shooting of a 16-year-old boy, was taken into custody Wednesday morning in Delaware County, officials said.

Tyvine “Blumberg Eerd” Jones, 25, was apprehended by U.S. marshals in an apartment where he had been hiding at the Stratford Court complex in Lansdowne, authorities said. Jones was considered one of the city’s most wanted fugitives, and in October, marshals issued a $5,000 reward for information leading to his arrest.

Eric Gartner, the United States marshal for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, said Jones’ “unrestrained existence serves only to diminish our great city,” and his arrest demonstrates the agency’s commitment to keep Philadelphians safe.

Investigators say Jones is a suspect in three slayings that took place between 2020 and 2022: the killings of Heyward Garrison, 16, Wesley Rodwell, 20, and Ryan Findley, 23.

No, of course The Philadelphia Inquirer did not include Mr Jones mugshot, just as the newspaper has had zero coverage of the eight Philly juveniles busted for shoplifting in Florida. The newspaper article did include an arrest photo, showing the back of the (alleged) murderer, just enough to show his long dreadlocks, which makes me wonder: if the newspaper’s mission, as defined by Publisher Elizabeth Hughes, is to make it an “anti racist news organization” and “Examining (their) crime and criminal justice coverage with Free Press, a nonprofit focused on racial justice in media,” why publish a photo which did not inform readers what the suspect looked like, but one which let readers know that he is black?

However, if it’s a good thing that an (alleged) hit man is off the streets, two more Philadelphians were sent untimely to their eternal rewards in another crime gone bad:

A man and teen were killed during attempted sale of a Rolex in Germantown, police say

The attempted sale erupted in gunfire Tuesday, leaving Tyree Ware and Quaneef Lee dead.

by Ellie Rushing and Jillian Kramer | Wednesday, December 10, 2025 | 4:03 PM EST

A man and teenager were killed Tuesday night in Germantown when investigators believe a meeting for the sale of a Rolex watch turned into a robbery, and a shoot-out erupted.

Tyree Ware, 30, drove to the 500 block of West Queen Lane to sell a Rolex he’d listed for sale online, police said. Quaneef Lee, 16, arrived with an acquaintance to purchase it, they said.

Detectives believe Lee and the other male then attempted to rob Ware of the watch at gunpoint, according to a law enforcement source who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation.

Rolex watches are ridiculously expensive, and are status symbols for the men who wear them. They are supposed to say, “I’m successful and wealthy and better than you” to other men, and “I’m successful and wealthy and you should go to bed with me” to women. Police recovered the Rolex from Mr Ware’s vehicle, and one of three guns used in the shooting.

We don’t know young Mr Lee’s intentions in attempting to buy acquire a Rolex; he may have had a second buyer for it, may have wanted it for status, or a number of possible reasons. But whatever his reason, he’s now stone-cold graveyard dead over (allegedly) attempting to steal a watch from a man who was willing to sell it to him. All three parties to this incident were armed, which one assumes means they were anticipating trouble. If so, trouble found them! Police recovered eleven bullet casings from the scene.

One last paragraph from the story:

The shooting comes as Philadelphia is on pace to record the fewest number of homicides in 60 years. Still, violence persists. Lee is one of at least 12 children shot and killed in the city this year.

Yes, violence persists, and two men are now dead over a watch, while Tywine Jones is possibly going to spend the rest of his miserable life behind bars, for (allegedly) killing three other people. These are all crimes of violence, but they are also crimes of absolute stupidity.

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The promotion of gambling by professional sports leagues is dangerous

Athletes like Pete Rose and Paul Hornung and Alex Karras have been suspended or banned from their sports over gambling, Mr Rose’s suspension lasting until after his death. The “Black Sox scandal” of 1919 occurred when eight members of the Chicago White Sox threw the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds, allegedly for a payment from gamblers betting on the outcome. Commissioners like Kenesaw Mountain Landis and Pete Rozelle were determined to keep their sports untainted by any connection with gambling.

But now we see all sorts of gambling information being put out by the major professional sports leagues. The NFL Network, owned by the National Football League, has plenty of sports gambling commercials, and I have also seen such in NBA and WNBA broadcasts. The NFL requires individual teams to publish injury reports and statuses during the week prior to the next game, and who needs that besides gamblers?

And so we get this:

Philly is now the No. 1 market for online gambling companies — and addiction helplines are ringing off the hook

Advertisers spent $37 million on the Philadelphia market in 2025. Online gambling help calls and texts have more than doubled in Pennsylvania and New Jersey since Mar 2021.

by Max Marin and Lizzie Mulvey | Wednesday, December 10, 2025 | 5:00 AM EST

One man, buried under $20,000 in online gambling debt, became homeless. A woman lost $13,000 and missed her last five mortgage payments. A mother gambled away her son’s college tuition, piling up over $100,000 in debt.

Such dire stories — shared with gambling helplines in Pennsylvania and New Jersey in recent years — are on the rise. And for the growing number of people, the problem isn’t the casino, but the apps on their phones that let them gamble anywhere, 24/7.

“My family is hosting fundraisers for my son who had a stroke, and here I am, gambling on my phone,” one caller said. “What’s wrong with me?”

The Philadelphia media market — which encompasses the city, southeastern Pa., central and southern New Jersey — has become an epicenter of online gambling in the United States. In 2024, internet gaming and sports wagering revenues alone topped $6 billion in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, up from about $3.6 billion in 2021.

The last play field goal by the Las Vegas Raiders, which changed their loss to the Denver Broncos from ten points to seven points, certainly looked like a play to do nothing but change winners and losers on the betting line.

As it happens, I finished Mario Puzo’s book The Godfather just a week or so ago. In it, Don Vito Corleone declined the opportunity to go into narcotics, saying that he’d lose his political friends and protection if he did, while the police pretty much looked the other way when it came to gambling, which they viewed as a harmless vice. But while gambling doesn’t leave junkies sleeping on the sidewalks and doorways of Kensington, the way narcotics do, there is damage nonetheless.

In the same period, the amount of calls and texts to 1-800-GAMBLER rose in both Pennsylvania and New Jersey, two of only six states in the U.S. where both sports betting and online casino games are legal. But calls about online gambling problems rose significantly more – 180% in Pennsylvania and 160% in New Jersey in that period. In 2019, only about one in ten Pa. callers said online gambling was their main issue. By 2024, it was every other caller.

My paternal grandparents, living in Antioch, California, would save their money, and occasionally take a trip to Reno, Nevada, to gamble. When they ran out of money, they were done. Now the casinos have ATMs all around, so that when gamblers run out of money, they can draw more out of their checking or savings accounts.

Unfortunately, the cited Philadelphia Inquirer article did not tell us whether there was evidence that gambling problems were greater in poorer areas than wealthy ones.

Having lived in the Keystone State, I sort of laughed at what had happened to the gambling ‘industry,’ Originally exclusive to Nevada, New Jersey saw the money that was being made, and legalized casino gambling in Atlantic City. Donald Trump and others built casinos, and flourished. Me? I thought that Atlantic City had wasted their greatest natural resource, their beaches, to promote gambling, and let the beaches go, if not completely to seed, to not very good.

Then Pennsylvania authorized casino gambling, and surprise, surprise, surprise, the Atlantic City casinos suffered, some going out of business, as Pennsylvanians stayed home to gamble. Now it seems as though every state has some form of legalized gambling, even if it’s only state-run lotteries.

I referred to the gambling ‘industry’ above, because this is an ‘industry’ which produces nothing; its sole purpose is to move money from some people to other people, with the state and the gambling ‘hosts’ getting their percentage, regardless of who wins.

The libertarian — not Libertarian! — in me says that if people want to gamble, it’s their business, not the state’s, but I know just as certainly as anyone can that out-of-control gambling destroys people and destroys families. Perhaps gambling shouldn’t be banned, but I cannot argue that we’re better off today than we were when only the Silver State had legalized gambling.

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You in a heap o’ trouble, boys! Apparently, no one told them that you can't get away with crime outside of Philly!

It is of absolutely no surprise to me that a site search of The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website for “Polk County” turned up exactly nothing on these eight fine but misunderstood young men from the City of Brotherly Love being so unjustly arrested in Polk County, Florida. But, Alas! the newspaper’s lack of coverage was not able to keep the story from Philadelphians, as both 6ABC and NBC10 News did cover it:

8 Philadelphia youth football players face charges in Fla. theft case

By Corey Davis | Tuesday, December 9, 2025 | 9:05 AM EST

PHILADELPHIA (WPVI) — Eight teenagers from the Philadelphia area are facing felony charges in Florida after authorities say they stole more than $2,000 worth of merchandise from a sporting goods store.

Neither 6ABC nor the NBC 10 News story named or showed mugshots of the arrested teens, but the Polk County Sheriff’s Office did. Sheriff Judd is rather famous for naming and shaming criminals arrested in Polk County, something this website absolutely supports. You can click on the image to the right to enlarge it to fill screen. The video of Sheriff Grady Judd’s news conference on this is embedded below, below the fold. Continue reading →

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Sometimes you just have to be an [insert slang term for the rectum here] to do things right

The tweet screen captured to the right is just one of hundreds, if not more than hundreds, aimed by the pro-Palestinian, pro-Hamas sympathizers and bots trying to pull on our heartstrings, at the plight of the poor, poor Palestinians, and the children! to generate relief aid and, of course, hatred of the Jooooos. I have little doubt that, had ubiquitous cell phones and social media existed in 1944, there’d be people telling us that the Germans were surely defeated by the end of the year, and that we didn’t really need to cross into the Third Reich, killing more innocents, and that we should offer Adolf Hitler and his cronies a ceasefire, to avoid more tragedy.

And horrors, after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we’d have people wanting to try President Truman and General Curtis LeMay and Robert Oppenheimer — he was a Jew, you know! — for war crimes, even though the two nuclear attacks forced the Japanese militarists to surrender without having to invade Honshu.

That Hamas and the Palestinians started a war that they could not win, by breaking into Israel, slaughtering 1199 people and taking another 251 hostage doesn’t seem to get mentioned. We must have sympathy, we must have empathy, for the children.

And so we come to the very lovely Amanda Marcotte:

MAGA’s war on empathy was started by a woman

Allie Beth Stuckey weaponizes her gender to sell the idea of a cold-hearted Jesus

By Amanda Marcotte | Monday, December 1, 2025 | 6:45 AM EST

Thanks to Elon Musk, most Americans learned earlier this year that MAGA thinks empathy is evil. Cruelty isn’t the problem, the Tesla CEO claimed in an attempt to justify his turn toward authoritarian politics. “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy,” he declared on Joe Rogan’s podcast in February.

As the billionaire was decimating much of the federal bureaucracy devoted to serving Americans, he said it was good to be heartless, comparing “the empathy response” to a computer bug. “We’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on,” he said, arguing counterintuitively that caring about others will somehow bring ruin to the entire human species.

As with much of the asinine ponderings coming from the Silicon Valley billionaire class, there’s a pseudo-intellectual rationale to prop up this nonsense. Musk got this “suicidal empathy” language from Gad Saad, a Canadian college professor who falsely presents himself as an “evolutionary behavioral scientist.” In fact, he’s a business professor with degrees in marketing and management, with no background in biology. But in 2024, Saad began pushing the notion that empathy has become a “cancer” because it allegedly has no “stopping mechanism” and will eventually kill its host — the human race. This, of course, is unscientific babbling, which is why the professor is a beloved guest on Rogan’s show. But it also cuts against basic common sense. Any study of wars, poverty and other manmade crises shows us that humanity still suffers from a lack of empathy, not a surfeit.

Given that Miss Marcotte’s degree is a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from St Edward’s University, it is at least questionable whether she should be taking judgements on how scientific other people’s work happens to be.

The quoted three paragraphs were actually Miss Marcotte’s introduction to a critique of “fundamentalist Christian influencer Allie Beth Stuckey” and her book “Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion“. Reading her article, I got the impression that Miss Marcotte hadn’t actually read Mrs Stuckey’s book, but was basing her arguments on a 2022 podcast and her “hyper-feminine aesthetics,” and that she looks like “a harmless church girl,” as though Mrs Stuckey’s choice of clothes and style are themselves attacks on feminism, which is something on which we previously reported, noting Miss Marcotte’s trashing of Riley Gaines Barker because “she has a round face and a girlish demeanor” and “favors fluffy lace, pink outfits.”

You can read the rest of the cited article by following the hyperlink embedded in the title; there is no paywall on Salon.

But the point made by Mrs Stuckey is accurate, as we can see from the pro-Palestinian propaganda. We’re supposed to have great empathy for the children, as though those children are the victims of Israel, rather than victims of the choices the adults, including their parents, in Gaza made by starting a war that they couldn’t win, and in celebrating the attack on October 7, 2023, and do what? Send billions more to Gaza, inundate them with food and clothing and waterproof shelters, the things they lost for being stupid enough to attack Israel?

Of course there’s more. Well-meaning empathy created social programs that were fraudulently abused on both the large and the smaller scale. The Senate Democrats forced the closure of the federal government in an attempt to push huge, renewed subsidies for Obaminablecare, and only relented when they realized that the ongoing closure meant that EBT Cards — the new term for Food Stamps — were not refilled at the beginning of November. Illegal immigration surged under President Biden because of his very empathetic views, and that led to increased crime in our cities along with a few truly terrible murders of young women by illegals.

I’ve said it before, and according to my site software, this will be the 19th article with the same title: sometimes you just have to be an [insert slang term for the rectum here] to do things right. We are 38 trillion dollars in debt due to huge expenditures for social welfare programs, when we did just fine, thank you very much, before Lyndon Johnson and his “Great Society” schemes.

No. Just no. We have to stop having our government responsible for the care of individuals, we have to stop letting empathy for the poor and downtrodden drive our government policies and spending. We have to start being [insert plural slang term for the rectum here] again.

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Import the third world, get the third world. Is it any surprise that immigrants from a country in which stealing from the government is a way of life would steal from the government here?

Governor Tim Walz (D-MN) was just terribly, terribly upset that President Donald Trump used “hateful behavior and this type of language” when Mr Trump described him as “seriously retarded.”

“We have fought three decades to get this out of our school. Kids know better than to use it,” Walz told (NBC’s Kristen) Welker. “But look, this is what Donald Trump has done. He’s normalized this type of hateful behavior and this type of language. And mainly, look, at first, I think it’s just because he’s not a good human being, but secondly to distract from his incompetency.”

But when the Governor, and 2024 Democratic Vice Presidential nominee, decided that junior high and high school boys needed tampon dispensers in their public school bathrooms, “seriously retarded” seems appropriate. Right now I’m reminded of season three, episode 8, of Shameless, where Sheila reclaims the dreaded “r” word. 🙂

Mr Trump wasn’t chastised, but ” target=”_blank”>doubled down on his characterization of Tampon Tim.

However now we have the stories, sourced from state workers, concerning how Governor Walz and the Minnesota state agencies ignored evidence of fraud perpetrated by Somali groups to raid federal funds. From The New York Times:

How Fraud Swamped Minnesota’s Social Services System on Tim Walz’s Watch

Prosecutors say members of the Somali diaspora, a group with growing political power, were largely responsible. President Trump has drawn national attention to the scandal amid his crackdown on immigration.

By Ernesto Londoño, Reporting from Minneapolis | Saturday, November 29, 2025 | Updated: Sunday, November 30, 2025

The fraud scandal that rattled Minnesota was staggering in its scale and brazenness.

Federal prosecutors charged dozens of people with felonies, accusing them of stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from a government program meant to keep children fed during the Covid-19 pandemic.

At first, many in the state saw the case as a one-off abuse during a health emergency. But as new schemes targeting the state’s generous safety net programs came to light, state and federal officials began to grapple with a jarring reality.

Over the last five years, law enforcement officials say, fraud took root in pockets of Minnesota’s Somali diaspora as scores of individuals made small fortunes by setting up companies that billed state agencies for millions of dollars’ worth of social services that were never provided.

Federal prosecutors say that 59 people have been convicted in those schemes so far, and that more than $1 billion in taxpayers’ money has been stolen in three plots they are investigating. That is more than Minnesota spends annually to run its Department of Corrections. Minnesota’s fraud scandal stood out even in the context of rampant theft during the pandemic, when Americans stole tens of billions through unemployment benefits, business loans and other forms of aid, according to federal auditors.

Note that the embedded link behind “rampant fraud” is dated April 9, 2024, when President Biden was still in office; this isn’t just some accusation by President Trump against his political enemies.

From the Lexington Herald-Leader:

The SBA estimates more than $200 billion of the $1.2 trillion it disbursed during the pandemic was obtained fraudulently, according to the Office of Inspector General.

Fraud was rampant during the panicdemic — not a typographical error, but exactly how I saw it — as it will always be whenever money from the government, federal, state, and local, is available, and while Minnesota is a blue state, it happens in states run by Republicans as well. From Breitbart:

The fraud has been so endemic in Minnesota that even the usually far-left Times is joining Breitbart News and calling it out. Indeed, the paper even noted that early on many liberals waved off the fraud as a “one-off abuse,” but as each new case rolled out from federal prosecutors the sense of alarm has grown and the blame is undeniable.

“Over the last five years, law enforcement officials say, fraud took root in pockets of Minnesota’s Somali diaspora as scores of individuals made small fortunes by setting up companies that billed state agencies for millions of dollars’ worth of social services that were never provided,” the Times reported.

The paper does not spare exposure of the Somali community.

Macalester College professor Ahmed Samatar, a Somali native, said that the fraud among Minnesota’s Somali migrants should not be surprising. The Times added that “Somali refugees who came to the United States after their country’s civil war were raised in a culture in which stealing from the country’s dysfunctional and corrupt government was widespread.”

Import the third world, get the third world!

The fraud has been so deep that it has undermined all of the state’s welfare programs.

“No one will support these programs if they continue to be riddled with fraud,” federal prosecutor Joseph H. Thompson told the media. “We’re losing our way of life in Minnesota in a very real way.”

Hey, the losses to fraud are very acceptable if they can somehow end welfare programs! But I seriously doubt they will.

Naturally, the left leapt to the defense of the Somalis:

Above and beyond this massive fraud and theft, investigators are also finding that Somali migrants have sent millions in taxpayer dollars to the African Islamic terror group known as Al-Shabaab.

A long list of Democrats have been rushing to stick up for the Somali community in Minnesota, including Rep. Ilhan Omar and a growing number of local officials.

Well, of course they did. After all, to note that the (alleged) fraud committed (allegedly) by Somali groups is raaaaacist. Is it any surprise that our friends on the left would leap top their defense? After all, they want to fight President Trump on everything, including his policies of enforcing our immigration laws. But the Herald-Leader story referenced a white husband and wife caught, prosecuted, and convicted of stealing from the COVIDiocy relief funds.

It’s simple: a clear pile of our taxpayer funds goes not to government agencies, but non-governmental organizations which promise, promise! to do only good things with the money, but which are only lightly, if at all, supervised or audited. That is not to say that government employees can’t commit fraud, but the sheer number of NGOs receiving taxpayer dollars multiplies the opportunities for fraud exponentially.

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Will these bad guys finally do some serious time?

Will the left be mad about this as well? They’ve been defending drug runners since President Trump has ordered action to sink their boats in the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of America, so this ought to get them grinding their teeth as well. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

How law enforcement built a sprawling case against a longstanding Kensington drug gang

Philly police and federal authorities used wiretaps, cameras, and confidential informants to target dealers on Weymouth Street.

by Chris Palmer and Jesse Bunch | Tuesday, November 25, 2025 | 5:00 AM EST

Ramon Roman-Montanez knew the police were watching.

One day last April, as Roman-Montanez prepared to hand out free drug samples to users on Weymouth Street — a common tactic that dealers use to attract customers — he stood in the middle of the Kensington block and spotted a problem.

The cops had put up a pole camera.

Using binoculars, Roman-Montanez scouted out the new device at the end of the block, prosecutors said in court documents. But he had a business to run — and so, after talking with a few associates in the street, he decided that giveaway day would move forward as planned.

Clearly, Mr Roman-Montanez and his “associates” — is that the new euphemism for gang-banger? — did not see it as very much of a problem, not in a city in which George Soros-sponsored, criminal-loving and police hating Larry Krasner is the District Attorney. If caught, what would they get, a slap on the wrist?

Whatever their thought processes, they (allegedly) went ahead and did it.

The camera, however, was just one hint of what authorities now say was a sprawling, multiyear investigation into the gang Roman-Montanez helped lead — a group that sold thousands of doses of heroin, fentanyl, crack, and cocaine over the course of more than a decade, and effectively took over a residential block in a neighborhood that has long suffered from crime, open-air drug dealing, and neglect.

The results of the probe came to light last month, when FBI Director Kash Patel came to Philadelphia to announce that 33 people, including Roman-Montanez, had been indicted for drug crimes. Patel called the case a model for law enforcement across the country, and an example of how to take out a drug gang terrorizing a community.

The most important part of this? This is a federal case, so Mr Krasner can’t deal out lenient plea bargains!

In August, for example, Roman-Montanez was charged in state court with drug possession and related crimes after police found fentanyl, crack, and $20,000 in cash in his house — the result of a raid on Weymouth Street that was part of the investigation into his gang.

But a few weeks later, his attorneys persuaded a Philadelphia judge to reduce his bail and he walked out of jail. The 40-year-old — who federal prosecutors now say was the de facto chief operating officer of one of the city’s biggest drug conspiracies — was only taken back into custody this month, when federal authorities unsealed his indictment.

No wonder Mr Roman-Montanez didn’t see much downside: in the state prosecution, which means the prosecution under Mr Krasner, nothing happened.

Other interesting paragraphs:

In 2020, Angel Rios-Valentin was convicted in federal court of illegal gun possession after officers found him carrying a loaded handgun that he’d taken from Roman-Montanez’s house. He was sentenced to five years in prison and was on supervised release when he was arrested again last month.

Police found four guns in Rios-Valentin’s house, a discovery that prosecutors said showed his ongoing commitment to the gang.

Roman-Montanez, meanwhile, was arrested twice in the last three years, court documents show — but in both cases managed to avoid significant consequences.

In October 2022, police searched his house and found 96 grams of fentanyl, four loaded guns, and nearly $125,000 in cash, prosecutors said. Roman-Montanez was charged in state court, but the case was withdrawn.

The article continued to tell us that scheduling issues with attorneys and witnesses delayed proceedings for more than a year, and prosecutors — there’s that Mr Krasner again! — withdrew the charges.

The investigation has dragged on for years, and the (alleged) principals managed to distribute tons of drugs into Kensington. There’s a reason that neighborhood is internationally infamous — the government of Mexico has actually used photos of Kensington in ads to discourage drug use in Mexico! — and is simply a waste case, because years and years of law enforcement looking the other way, the city government being oh-so-sympathetic as far as drug use and junkies are concerned, have left the bad guys in charge, the addicts littering the streets, and the decent people living there stuck in their homes, afraid to come out of doors any more often than absolutely necessary. After eight years of neglect under former Mayor Jim Kenney, current Mayor Cherelle Parker Mullins has made some moves to do something about the neighborhood, but Mr Krasner has attempted to throw roadblocks into that effort where he can.

The federal investigation dates from the beginning of President Trump’s first term, continued through the Joe Biden years, and finally, nine months into Mr Trump’s second term things are getting done. I only have to wonder how quickly new ‘entrepreneurs’ will replace the 33 gang-bangers now under arrest.

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How can Israel and the Arabs live next to each other in peace if an “Islamic scholar” cannot sit in the same room in NYC with a Jew?

So many good and kind Americans believe that the solution to the strife between the Israelis and their Arab neighbors is a simple one: an independent Palestinian nation, living in peace, side-by-side with Israel. What could possibly the objection to that?

Well, Yassir Arafat, then President of the so-called ‘Palestinian Authority,’ objected, because even though President Bill Clinton had gotten Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak to agree to an independent Palestine in 97% of Judea and Samaria, as well as Gaza, and a land swap from Israel proper to make up for the 3% in the ‘West Bank’ which had Jewish settlements, it didn’t include the ‘right of return’ for displaced ‘Palestinians’ to return to their homes in Israel. That, at least, was his stated reason, though the real reason was that he knew he would be assassinated by the irredentists who would never agree to allow Israel a single foothold in the Levant.

In 2005, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon forced all Jewish settlers to evacuate Gaza, turning it all over to the ‘Palestinians’ to do with it what they would. What Israel and the rest of the world hoped they would do is create a peaceful enclave, the type of thing which would prove that the Arabs could and would live in peace beside Israel. Instead, Hamas took over governing control of Gaza in 2007, and what was built were tunnels from which to attack Israel.

Still, that was all seven time zones away from the United States. Arabs and Jews could live side-by-side in peace here, right?

‘Imam’ tells CUNY Muslim students to leave interfaith event because a ‘Zionist’ is present

By Carl Campanile | Wednesday, November 19, 2025 | 6:54 PM EST

So much for kumbaya.

A self-proclaimed imam speaking at a CUNY City College interfaith event went into a Jew-hating tirade, urging Muslim students to leave in protest after complaining that a “Zionist” was present.

The City University of New York said it is now investigating the shocking incident last week that targeted Ilya Bratman, an adjunct lecturer at Baruch College and the director of the Hillel Jewish campus organization.

“I came here to this event not knowing I would be sitting next to a Zionist and this is something I am not going to accept,” said the Islamic scholar Abdullah Mady, referring to Bratman, according to an audio recording obtained by The Post.

Gaza is 5,689 miles away from New York City, but Mr Mady couldn’t sit next to a Jooooo who was in no way threatening him.

“My people are being killed right now in Gaza,” he said. “If you’re a Muslim, out of strength and dignity, I ask you to exit this room immediately.”

About 100 students in attendance took up the call and walked out, leaving about 20 Christian and Jewish students who remained in the room stunned, Bratman said.

The New York Post story does not tell us how many of the 100 or so who walked out were Muslims.

Campus security then escorted the remaining attendees, as the whole thing broke up, outside, to protect them from any hostile demonstrations from the ones who had walked out.

The advertising poster for the meeting, pictured above, uses the silhouette of a Jewish menorah as one of the various religious symbols, but Mr Mady was surprised that there was a Jew there? If an “Islamic scholar” could not sit beside an adjunct lecturer from a Jewish college, a quarter of the world away from the scene of the war, how can anyone ever expect Israel and an independent ‘Palestine’ to share a border in peace?

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The slow growth of the Catholic Church

Stations of the Cross, St Elizabeth’s Church, Lent 2024.

Our own parish, St Elizabeth’s, is too small to draw any conclusions from seeing new members, but we currently have two new attendees taking OCIA, Order of Christian Initiation for Adults, classes, and a third young man showed up last Sunday and is interested. For a parish with only 24 families, this is a very big deal, but statistically invalid as far as any big picture is concerned.

But our parish isn’t the only one seeing new members:

Young people are converting to Catholicism en masse — driven by pandemic, internet, ‘lax’ alternatives

By Rikki Schlott | Thursday, April 17, 2025 | 11:00 AM EDT

Sydney Johnston grew up in a nondenominational Christian household — but now the Upper West Side millennial is a devout Catholic.

“There’s just something so beautiful and transcendent about the rituals and the ancient history in the Catholic Mass that’s been preserved,” Johnston, 30, told The Post. “The church really communicates a degree of reverence that I didn’t find in the more liberal, laissez-faire approach of nondenominational churches.”

Confirmed in December 2024 at the Church of Notre Dame in Morningside Heights, Johnston is one of a growing number of young people turning to the Catholic Church from other denominations, religions and even no faith at all.

According to the National Catholic Register, some dioceses are reporting year-over-year increases of 30% to 70% in new converts. The Diocese of Fort Worth, Texas, for instance, experienced a 72% jump in converts just from 2023 to 2024.

There’s much more at the original, and the New York Post, our nation’s second oldest continuously published daily newspaper, founded in 1801 by Alexander Hamilton, is not hidden behind a paywall, so you can follow the link freely.

Yes, I had heard, anecdotally, of a surge in Catholicism, which some have attributed to the assassination of Charlie Kirk and the accession of Pope Leo XIV, an American from Chicago, but the Post article predates both of those events. But it was the following article which really caught my attention:

More than one in three Catholic ordinations are former Anglican clergy, says new report

More than one third of priestly ordinations in the Catholic Church in England and Wales from 1992 to 2024 were former Anglican clergy, according to a report published today.

Ruth Gledhill | Thursday, November 20, 2025

Around 700 former clergy and religious of the Church of England, Church in Wales or Scottish Episcopal Church have been received into the Catholic Church since 1992, including 16 former Anglican bishops and two “continuing” Anglican bishops. From 1992 to 2025, five Anglican permanent deacons and 486 Anglican priests were ordained in the Catholic Church.

The report shows that 29 per cent of diocesan priestly ordinations from 1992 to 2024 in England and Wales were former Anglican clergy, while 35 per cent of combined diocesan and Ordinariate priestly ordinations from 1992 to 2024 in England and Wales were former Anglican clergy.

Convert Clergy in the Catholic Church in Britain: The role of the St Barnabas Society by Stephen Bullivant, Fernanda Mee and Janet Mellor is published by the St Barnabas Society and the Benedict XVI Centre for Religion, Ethics and Society at St Mary’s University, Twickenham.

Hyperlink not in the original, but added by me. The original is a 24 page long .pdf file, and is available without charge.

It reveals that by comparison, just 9 per cent of diocesan priestly ordinations from 2015 to 2024 in England and Wales were former Anglican clergy and 19 per cent of combined diocesan and Ordinariate priestly ordinations from 2015 to 2024 in England and Wales were former Anglican clergy.

The Church of England General Synod voted to ordain women priests in 1992, and the first women were priested in 1994

In the foreword, Archbishop of Westminster Cardinal Vincent Nichols, acknowledges that the movement of clergy from the Church of England into full communion with the Catholic Church in recent times is a story of many parts and says that until now, those parts have not been drawn together.

In July of 1980, His Holiness Pope St John Paul II issued the Pastoral Provision, allowing Anglican/Episcopal priests who convert to Catholicism to be ordained as Catholic priests, even if they are married. The Anglican/Episcopal female priests can convert to Catholicism, but cannot be ordained as Catholic priests.

The Church of England has been falling and failing for a long time now. The Catholic Herald reported, last April, that, driven by younger churchgoers, Catholics were on a pace to outnumber Anglicans in England, for the first time since King Henry VIII forced the Reformation on the island nation. Somewhere in Heaven, St Thomas More is smiling.