Category Archives: Economics

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The #ClimateChange activists want more people to move to large cities They are pushing 'walkable' neighborhoods and public transportation

A view from our farm; the river is just beyond the trees.

The activists wanting to fight global warming climate change have long said that increased urbanization is part of the solutions they seek:

Huge gains, in terms of reducing harmful gases, can be made by changing how we plan, build, manage and power our cities and towns. Well designed, compact, walkable cities with good public transport greatly reduce our per capita carbon footprint and are key to achieving many of the Sustainable Development Goals of which climate action is a key part.

Good public transportation, huh? We have already noted how a well-funded public transportation system, the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Agency, SEPTA, has admitted that they have lost control of the train cars as the heavily Democratic city has lost any semblance of control over crime, drug abuse, and homelessness, and SEPTA’s ridership is still below that before the panicdemic. Having the homeless and the junkies using SEPTA trains and train and subway stations for shelter and shooting galleries will cause decent people to avoid the system.

But there’s another problem with promoting increased urbanization:

The Philly area doesn’t have enough homes available for low- and middle-income buyers

In the Philadelphia metro area, households making $50,000 faced the largest shortage of available, affordable homes for sale, according to the National Association of Realtors and Realtors.com.

by Michaelle Bond | Friday, June 9, 2023 | 5:00 AM EDT

More than one million homes nationwide were available for sale in late April. But high prices mean that what’s out there doesn’t match what people at various income levels can afford, according to a new report from the nation’s Realtors.

Basically, home listings affordable for middle- and lower-income households are missing. The country needs more homes that households at all income levels can buy to chip away at the problems of low affordability and low housing supply, according to a report that the National Association of Realtors and Realtor.com released Thursday.

“Ongoing high housing costs and the scarcity of available homes continues to present budget challenges for many prospective buyers, and it’s likely keeping some buyers in the rental market or on the sidelines and delaying their purchase until conditions improve,” Danielle Hale, Realtor.com’s chief economist, said in a statement.

The report breaks down the number of homes missing for each income level by comparing the number of listings available in April to the number that would need to be available to accommodate buyers. Realtors said they hope local and federal governments can use their analysis to ease the twin problems of affordability and housing supply.

According to the story, households with a $50,000 income level can afford homes that cost up to $163,440, but if the Philadelphia market is short 3,440 homes listed for sale at that or lower prices, there’s also the obvious question: what can someone buy at those prices? We previously noted the home at 4931 Hoopes Street, listed for $125,000 in April, but down to $75,000 now.

Kitchen at 1829 North Bucknell Street, via zillow.com

For just $69,750, you can buy this 3 bedroom, 1 bathroom 870 ft² fixer-upper at 1829 North Bucknell Street. That’s North Philadelphia, not exactly a great neighborhood!

Now, why did I pick that listing? In December of 2021, we bought a small, detached house, 2 bedrooms, 1 bath, 1,344 ft², with a detached one-car garage, in a small town in Kentucky for $70,000. My nephew and I had to remodel the bathroom and redo the plumbing, but, doing the work ourselves, spent less than $2,000. The house is perfectly neat and clean and livable — and is rented out to my sister-in-law — yet was virtually the same price. What we spent in a small town for a decent, if not modern, house, will buy you an absolute dump in North Philly.

716 West Allegheny Avenue, photo via zillow,com.

$70,000 will buy you this boarded-up, barred-in porch, 1,260 ft² rowhome at 716 West Allegheny Avenue, in the Fairhill neighborhood in the Philadelphia Badlands. Sorry, no interior pictures in the listing. The realtor probably figures that interior photos will scare off more prospective buyers.

114 South Cecil Street, photo via zillow.com.

The story stated that a household with a $50,000 income could afford a home of up to $146,440. For $145,000, you can buy this home at 114 South Cecil Street, in West Philly.

And with all of that, the Philadelphia metropolitan area was one of only four major metropolitan areas — the others being Detroit, Houston, and Cleveland — in which buying a home was less expensive than renting.

The global warming climate change activists want more and more people to move into densely-populated urban areas, and to use public transportation, to reduce CO2 emissions, but one thing is very clear: doing so will make people, especially people at the lower end of the economic spectrum, poorer than ever. Housing prices for even modest homes are hugely inflated, and mortgage interest rates have increased significantly.

It’s really quite simple: the activists live in urban areas, and that is the life they see as their baseline good. Those of us who live out in the sticks are just a bunch of unedumacated rubes. But the activists also have money, and have been able to afford living in the cities, and living reasonably well. They have to be economically secure, simply to have the time to be activist. What they seem unable to grasp is that there are a lot of people living paycheck-to-paycheck, people who can’t afford the inflated urban housing costs.

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The Philadelphia Inquirer whines that not enough blacks are getting into the legal marijuana business.

The Garden State legalized pot, so now The Philadelphia Inquirer is lamenting that not enough of New Jersey’s drug dealers are black!

New Jersey has few Black-owned marijuana dispensaries. A banker-turned-budtender is about to open one.

Tahir Johnson is preparing to open Simply Pure Trenton in his hometown of Ewing Township.

by Nick Vadala | Saturday, June 10, 2023 | 5:00 AM EDT

As a college student at Howard University in 2005, Tahir Johnson decided to go to the beach. He put on his pink polo shirt, packed up his decked-out red Lexus, grabbed his youngest brother and little cousin, and set off for Ocean City, Md.

But rather than a day in the sand, Johnson got pulled over due to a broken taillight — one traffic stop of what he estimates to be about 100 in his life. The officer told Johnson, who is Black, that he looked like a drug dealer. Johnson told the officer he had weed in his trunk. The police found it, and arrested him. He was convicted on a possession charge, and would later be arrested two more times for marijuana.

Looks like the officer — assuming that Mr Johnson told his tale accurately, and that it’s not just a whiny ‘driving while black’ meme — got it right.

His marijuana-related arrests and conviction have since been expunged. But Johnson’s legal issues never scared him away from cannabis.

Now, Johnson, 39, is preparing to open Simply Pure Trenton in Ewing Township, N.J., his hometown. The shop will make Johnson one of the first Black recreational dispensary owners in New Jersey, and one of the state’s first operating owners with a cannabis-related conviction. Simply Pure Trenton is tentatively set to open in July.

Tahir Johnson, CEO of the soon-to-open recreational marijuana shop Simply Pure Trenton in Ewing, N.J., Friday, May 12, 2023. Johnson programs his robot receptionist named Pepper to greet guests.

So, not only did the Inquirer tell us about Mr Johnson’s new business, but even provided the hyperlink to it, helpfully aiding readers to get to his store to get high.

In Mercer County, which includes Trenton and Ewing, police arrested Black people for marijuana at a rate 4.1 times higher than white people between 2010 and 2018, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. And New Jersey’s prison population has the highest racial disparity in the country, with Black people being incarcerated at a rate 12.5 times higher than whites, a 2021 report from the Sentencing Project found.

As we have previously documented, at least when it comes to homicide, black Americans both commit and are victims of that crime at a hugely elevated rate compared to white Americans. Unlike most offenses, murder is a crime of evidence, not a crime of reporting, as it’s very difficult to simply dispose of a body without it being noticed; dead bodies get found, and that leads to mostly reliable statistics. Yet the left somehow, some way, cannot seem to grasp the concept that perhaps, just perhaps, black Americans might commit other crimes at ‘disproportionate’ rates. Perhaps, just perhaps, if black New Jersey residents are “being incarcerated at a rate 12.5 times higher than whites,” this is indicative not of racism, but black New Jerseyans committing crimes at a far greater rate than whites. Why is that not a possibility being considered?

Discrimination, especially in enforcing marijuana laws, was “egregious” in Trenton, Johnson said. “If you’re unlucky enough to have even a seed or a roach, your whole life is ruined.”

So, the way to not have your life ruined is to not have “even a seed or a roach”, right?

A common criticism of the legal marijuana industry is that while Black people have been disproportionately targeted for cannabis offenses, white business owners are benefiting from legalization. New Jersey’s marijuana legalization laws have attempted to address that impact: The state’s Cannabis Regulatory Commission gives priority to applicants with cannabis-related convictions, as well as those who come from communities inordinately harmed by the war on drugs, such as Trenton and Ewing.

So, the Garden State is actually giving preferential treatment to convicted criminals rather than citizens with clean records. Wouldn’t the normal suspicion be that someone who has previously broken the law would be less likely to obey the law in the future? Isn’t that why we have the perfectly reasonable conditions that criminals released from prison have probation officers to whom they must report, and are legally barred from owning firearms?

There’s more at the original, a lot of it being laments about “underrepresented” racial and ethnic groups having difficulty raising money to get into that stinking business. I have to wonder: would the Inquirer have written it this way if the subject was liquor stores?

Let’s tell the truth here: marijuana use hurts black Americans at a ‘disproportionate’ rate, because it keeps more of them out of good jobs. If you are applying for a job which requires a commercial driver’s license, you will be subjected to pre-employment drug testing, and the company will be, under federal laws, required to maintain some form of random drug testing of covered personnel. Test hot for pot, and it’s off to the unemployment line you go! Many jobs which require personnel to handle money, along with other things, require pre-employment drug screens. And in the Inquirer’s hometown, where pot isn’t legal, rampant drug use of things other than marijuana has led to tremendous drug abuse problems; why wouldn’t the editors of the newspaper be taking a hard line against drug usage if they are so concerned about economic conditions for black Philadelphians?

Yet, in this article, the Inky is practically advocating more marijuana use by black citizens.

Using drugs, including alcohol, alters people’s sobriety, and being less than sober hurts people’s abilities to take good decisions and get and hold decent jobs. In America’s poorest large city, one would think that a sensible editorial position for our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper would be to want more residents, of all racial and ethnic groups, to be at their best and strongest economic and competitive conditions, to improve their lives individually and as part of the larger community, but that’s not what the Inky seems to do.

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What could possibly go wrong?

Who could ever have predicted this?

Pronouns Ruin Prospects: Research Proves Hiring Managers’ Bias Against Non-Binary and Gender Queer Pronoun Users

by Ananyaa Bhowmik | May 30, 2023

Pronouns may be nothing new, but the idea that people may claim their own is still somewhat astonishing to some. Many people still succumb to the siren call of referring to people using binary pronouns.

While struggling to get used to something relatively new is understandable, what is not fair is using it as an excuse to promote bias, especially when it can keep people from earning their livelihoods. Yet hiring managers all over the world seem to be doing just that.

Simply put, research into recent hiring trends shows that resumes with genderqueer and non-binary pronouns elicit less than enthusiastic responses from prospective employers. Some applications are skipped over entirely, while others never receive a callback. A worrying trend, to say the least.

Why wouldn’t a responsible human resources manager discard résumés in which the applicant is telling him that he’s a walking, talking hostile workplace lawsuit?

It isn’t difficult to see where the issue is. If someone goes to the extent of specifying “genderqueer and non-binary pronouns,” he is telling his prospective employer that he finds the issue serious, and wants to be referred to in ways that most normal English-speaking people would not normally use. Whether deliberately or otherwise, such a person may be referred to with references of which he disapproves, and too many such incidences could generate a lawsuit against the employer. The human resources manager’s job is to do more than find the best employees; it is also to protect the company from lawsuits. And one of the easiest ways to do that is not to hire people who could be seen as increasing the probability of a hostile workplace lawsuit.

Legislative guidance introduced by NYCHRL clearly states that the “use the name, pronouns, and title (e.g., Ms./Mrs./Mx.) 15 with which a person self-identifies, regardless of the person’s sex assigned at birth, anatomy, gender, medical history, appearance, or the sex indicated on the person’s identification.” Despite that, recent research conducted by Business.com concluded that “More than 80 percent of nonbinary people believed that identifying as nonbinary would hurt their job search.”

I spent my career in an almost all-male industry, and it doesn’t take much imagination to see how a significant number of the men with whom I worked would react to a “genderqueer or non-binary” employee. Such an employee would receive little respect and be the target of disparaging remarks. Why would I want to risk having to discipline, and perhaps even lose several trained and experience concrete mixer drivers because there was one employee who specified references which were out-of-the-norm?

I’m retired now, and hadn’t handled any hiring duties the last eleven years during my career, so I, fortunately, never had to face any such silliness in my decisions. But I do know one thing: the job of any employee in taking hiring decisions is to do the best job for the company, and not the applicants.

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This is the kind of thing that ‘progressives’ just don’t understand

Many people have made fun of Helen Gym Flaherty’s huge promises, including this poor site, with even the Editorial Board of the very liberal Philadelphia Inquirer calling her out:

Gym should be honest about her big spending agenda before voters go to the polls on May 16. Philadelphia does not have unlimited funds. Under Mayor Jim Kenney, the city’s budget increased 50% to $6 billion with little to show for the spending spree.

The city tried to tax and spend its way to prosperity in the 1970s and ‘80s and nearly went bankrupt. Despite 25 years of fiscal sanity before Kenney was elected, Philadelphia remains one of the most heavily taxed cities in the country. The city’s tax burden continues to contribute to its slow job growth, which, in turn, is linked to its high poverty rate.

Sometimes it’s the little stories which illustrate the problem:

Philadelphia pool closures leave neighborhoods without a vital community resource: ‘Why our pool?’

Across the area pools have been closing down due to lifeguard shortages and ongoing renovations. No one is certain when, or if, some pools will open again.

by Allison Beck | Monday, May 15, 2023 | 5:00 AM EDT

On a March afternoon, Lakia Toney recalled the sounds of kids laughing and splashing in the clear blue water during a summer afternoon. Neighbors of all ages joined in on the fun at 12th and Cambria Recreation Center.

She smiled at the memory of her North Philadelphia community enjoying the safety of the city-run pool, and one another’s company.

“(T)he safety of the city-run pool”? Perhaps the author, Allison Beck, forgot about, or never heard of, the city having to close the pool at the McVeigh Recreation Center last year due to “unruly behavior,”, violence, and vandalism.

Patrons of 17 Philadelphia pools are dealing with a similar story. Between lifeguard shortages and renovations, no one is certain when, or if, the pools will open again. The area pools that open often do so later in the season, with their gates closing after as little as six weeks.

Just 50 of 72 city pools could open in 2023, and many of them for only a portion of the summer.

Parks and Recreation has been recruiting lifeguards through high schools, community groups, and employment organizations. They are hiring Philadelphians who do not yet know how to swim and offering free training and certification ahead of the summer. Pay was recently raised to $16 per hour, with a $1,000 end-of-season bonus if guards submitted their applications by April 15.

Just how desperate do they have to be to find lifeguards if the city has to first train people who don’t even know how to swim?

Toney said the background checks and drug testing needed for lifeguards are a big barrier for some neighborhood youths. All candidates are required to submit to background checks and must pass a drug screening if they are over 18, according to Andrew Alter, a spokesperson for Parks and Recreation.

“When there are opportunities like this where they could be making a great income or helping out the community, helping out themselves, they’re not able to,” Toney said. “They can’t be a part of that because they’re involved in things that they’re not supposed to be doing and it’s hindering them from actually helping themselves and others.”

Heaven forfend! You mean that city employees who would be responsible for rescuing swimmers in distress, and be able to perform CPR, would be expected to be clean and sober, expected to not use drugs?

The ‘progressives’ seem to think that our social problems are caused by government not doing enough, and Mrs Flaherty has been frequently mocked for saying that part of the solution is to have more public libraries open, for longer hours, I guess so the gang-bangers and wannabes could sit in there are read Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie books.

If, of course, they could read at all. Mrs Flaherty has bragged how she saved the Edward T Steel Elementary School from ‘going charter,’ but the school is ranked 1,205th out of 1,607 Pennsylvania elementary schools, 1% of students scored at or above the proficient level for their grade in math, and 8% scored at or above that level in reading.

But, like lifeguards, there is a shortage of librarians, and a shortage of money to pay for more of them and keep libraries open longer. Mayor Jim Kenney, if not as hard-left ‘progressive’ as Mrs Flaherty, would have loved to keep the libraries open longer, and the City Council would have appropriated money for it, if the city had the money!

Note that even the Editorial Board of the Inky stated that Philadelphians were very highly taxed, and that has contributed to slower job growth and economic opportunities.

I will admit it: while I’d like to see the City of Brotherly Love saved from the looming disaster of progressivism, there’s a little part of me which wouldn’t be all that upset if Mrs Flaherty won, because then Philadelphians, Pennsylvanians, and the whole nation would be able to see what an utter failure progressive policies would be. Coupled up with the police-hating defense lawyer who is the city’s District Attorney, and adding to that a police department crippled by inept leadership and a huge shortage of officers, Philly would become the disaster area of the eastern seaboard, and perhaps, just perhaps, teach the well-to-do liberals who have been voting for Democrats for so long that being soft-on-crime and supporting the bad behavior that makes and keeps people poor harms our society and our country.

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Hold them accountable! The good old boys’ network strikes again

I have frequently called out The Philadelphia Inquirer for poor reporting, so it is only fair when I note when they do good journalism.

The quiet handling of rape allegations at two Philly health institutions

How Jefferson and Rothman dealt with an alleged sexual assault involving an orthopedic surgeon and a medical resident.

by Wendy Ruderman | Monday, May 8, 2023

It was almost midnight and Jessica Phillips, a doctor training in orthopedic surgery, was one of the few guests remaining at a pool party that surgeon John Abraham hosted each summer for Thomas Jefferson University medical residents at his nine-bedroom Main Line home.

Phillips sat in an Adirondack-style chair by a stone fire pit with Abraham, a (Thomas) Jefferson (University) professor and division chief at the Rothman Orthopaedic Institute, a private practice whose physicians work at the university’s hospitals.

The band had packed up, and caterers had cleared the wine glasses and plates smeared with cocktail sauce. Abraham handed her a lit Cuban cigar. She later remembered being so drunk she dropped it on her pants.

The medical resident remembered little else afterward. In flashes, while in and out of consciousness, she recalled Abraham on top of her on the ornate rug in his library. She awoke in his bedroom naked and bruised, she later told multiple investigators.

In Abraham’s recollection, Phillips pulled him on top of her on the library floor, court records show, while his judgment was impaired by alcohol. Nonetheless, in a text message sent to his boss after the party, Abraham acknowledged it was “unethical” to have sex with a medical resident.

It’s a very long story, and there’s a lot of he said/she said in it. Both physicians were intoxicated, both married, though Dr Abraham, then 43-years-old, was going through a divorce, and neither was really capable of consent. As her supervisor, Dr Abraham was contractually barred from a sexual relationship with a subordinate. An investigation resulted in no criminal charges. This is being made public because both Dr Abraham and Dr Phillips are suing.

The events of the June 2018 party spurred three separate investigations and three lawsuits – all now rolling back the confidentiality that usually cloaks how major institutions handle sexual misconduct claims. The cases chronicle sex, power and money in the male-dominated world of orthopedic surgery.

Both Phillips and Abraham say they were victims. They blame Jefferson and Rothman for protecting their institutional interests despite federal regulations that are supposed to ensure sexual assault cases are dealt with fairly.

Ahhh, yes, “protecting their institutional interests”. That’s what “institutions” do!

Jefferson used the threat of federal reporting requirements to force Abraham out of its hospitals while evading formal reports that would let other institutions know what happened.

Then Jefferson’s and Rothman’s leadership brokered a deal that avoided a sexual misconduct hearing and ultimately closed an investigation opened under the federal Title IX law prohibiting sex-based discrimination.

Rothman’s all-male board of directors decided not to fire Abraham. Instead, they restricted him from working in Jefferson’s hospitals or interacting with Jefferson residents. Eventually, they moved him to a hospital network not affiliated with Jefferson in New Jersey.

I remember when then-District Attorney Seth Williams went hard after Monsignor William Lynn, the Archdiocese of Philadelphia’s supervisor of priest assignments, who was convicted on one of two counts of child endangerment for “knowingly placing minors in danger when he reassigned troubled priests to parishes where they would have access to children.” Msgr Lynn wound up serving almost three years of his three-to-six year sentence, when his conviction was overturned, twice actually, for Mr Williams and Judge Teresa Sarmina misapplying the law.

So, with all of this, why isn’t current Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner going after Thomas Jefferson University and the Rothman Orthopaedic Institute for doing what is a very similar thing? According to the Inquirer, Rothman basically moved Dr Abraham to someplace where his conduct wasn’t widely known, and to a hospital network outside of their control . . . and their liability.

Amid investigations by the university and Rothman, Abraham said, a Jefferson top doctor offered him a deal in a private conversation: Take a voluntary leave, and we won’t report the alleged sexual misconduct.

Congress generally expects health institutions employing doctors accused of wrongdoing to file a report into the National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB), a federal tracking system.

Hospitals must query the data bank before credentialing a newly hired doctor to ensure that the person hasn’t gotten into trouble elsewhere. Data bank reports also go to state licensing boards.

In court depositions, Abraham recalled getting a phone call from Edmund Pribitkin, chief physician and executive vice president of Jefferson Health, telling him that he had to take an immediate leave of absence from Jefferson.

If he didn’t do as told, Pribitkin said, the sexual assault allegations would go before the hospital’s medical executive committee and they’d likely have to report him to the NPDB, according to Abraham.

So, Rothman essentially blackmailed Dr Abraham into taking an immediate leave, by saying that the Institute would commit a crime by not reporting the sexual assault allegations. Perhaps it’s not just the District Attorney who needs to look into this, but the United States Attorney as well, given that this is an allegation of violation of federal law.

There’s a lot more information at the Inky’s original, and it’s not limited to subscribers, though if you access more than a few articles a month, the paywall does come down.

As a Mass-every-Sunday Catholic, I was very disappointed with the allegations against Msgr Lynn. At most, I saw what he was alleged to have done as a crime by Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua, but when this became a criminal case, the Cardinal, by then retired, 88-years-old, and suffering from cancer and dementia, couldn’t be tried. Early in the trial, Judge Sarmina ruled that Cardinal Bevilacqua was able and competent to give testimony as a witness in the case, but just two days after her ruling, the Cardinal died in his sleep. But while Mr Williams and Judge Sarmina misapplied the law as it stood, which resulted in an unfair, and eventually reversed, conviction, the point that the Archdiocese of Philadelphia shuffled around offending priests to keep them from being defrocked or, worse, charged, tried, and convicted in sexual abuse cases was a valid one. Supervisory officials such as then Pennsylvania State University President Graham Spanier, Athletic Director Tim Curley, and Senior Vice President for Finance and Business Gary Schultz, who was responsible for oversight of the campus police department, were all held accountable for covering up former Assistant Football Coach Jerry Sandusky’s rape of a young boy, though they were incarcerated for just a couple of months each.

The Inquirer’s story is the first step, and now law enforcement needs to look into this case. Yeah, there are some wealthy and powerful interests involved here, people able to pay for major league legal help, but the potential prosecution has plenty of money as well. Hold them accountable, and maybe some other good old boys network will think twice before covering up things.

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It was never about tolerance; it was always about forced acceptance

We first mentioned Dylan Mulvaney a month ago, when, as Robert Stacy McCain put it, “satire is rapidly becoming impossible because reality has gotten so weird.” Since then, two well-paid executives accepting his ‘reality’ have managed to get themselves fired “leaves of absence“.

Mr Mulvaney managed to keep his mouth shut for a while, as someone told him he realized that opening it would not help his cause.

Well, he’s talking again, but it isn’t helping his case. According to Mr Mulvaney, I should be in jail!

What did he say?

The articles written about me using ‘he’ pronouns and calling me a man over and over again, and I feel like that should be illegal, I, I don’t know, that’s just bad journalism.

He may rest assured, while I always referred to him as male and use the masculine pronouns, I have never called him a man. Nevertheless, Mr Mulvaney believes that “should be illegal.” I’m not certain under what existing laws he believes that it “should be illegal,” or whether he believes that a new law should be passed to make it so, but I’m pretty solidly in favor of this one:

The hand-written copy of the proposed articles of amendment passed by Congress in 1789, cropped to show just the text in the third article that would later be ratified as the First Amendment.

You’ve heard of the First Amendment, right? That pesky part of the Constitution of the United States which states:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

What Mr Mulvaney doesn’t seem to understand is that the First Amendment protects his right to claim that he’s actually a girl, or to say that he believes it should be illegal for [insert plural slang term for the anus here] like me to refer to him in ways which do not accept his claim that he’s really a woman. I absolutely support his right to say what he wishes, but I also have the right to say that I believe anyone who accepts what he has said as somehow truthful is dumb as a box of rocks.

Naturally, the vast majority of the professional media have been using Mr Mulvaney’s preferred terms, and, as we have previously reported, The Philadelphia Inquirer decided to double down with a fluff piece on Will Thomas, the male former University of Pennsylvania swimmer who decided that he was really a woman, and was calling himself “Lia.” The credentialed media have been quite diligent in their attempts to ‘normalize’ the cockamamie idea that girls can be boys and boys can be girls.

That wasn’t all Mr Mulvaney had to say. This is from the HuffPost, so naturally it’s all favorable to him!

Dylan Mulvaney Breaks Silence In Wake Of Bud Light Partnership Backlash

Story by Ben Blanchet • Friday, April 28, 2023

Dylan Mulvaney said she (sic) has struggled to understand “the need to dehumanize and be cruel” following right-wing outrage over her partnership with Bud Light earlier this month. . . . .

Mulvaney, in her (sic) first TikTok in roughly three weeks, said some of what’s “been said” about her (sic) has been far from the truth and revealed that she’s been “having crazy deja vu” after facing criticism.

“I’m an adult, I’m 26 and throughout childhood I was called too feminine and over-the-top and here I am now being called all those same things but this time it’s from other adults,” said Mulvaney, who later quipped that she (sic) should be accused of being a theater person who is camp.

Well, that last is true enough: he is a “theater person who is ‘camp’.” His schtick is over-the-top campiness, and a total parody of how real girls act, yet he doesn’t seem to see how the whole thing makes him wholly unbelievable, and actually hurts people who are ‘transgender’ and are simply trying to fit in to society as they see themselves. Making a spectacle of yourself hardly seems to be trying to fit in.

If that’s all it was, no one would really care. But the left are pushing laws which require other people to go along with a ‘transgendered’ person’s faux name and requested pronouns and honorifics, some of which have passed, subjecting employers to hostile workplace violations if an employee refuses to lie about another employee’s sex, and can even fine businesses if an employee ‘misgenders’ or ‘deadnames’ a customer.

Translation: at least in New York City, the truth will set you free . . . from your job.

As Erick Erickson put it, “You will be made to care.”

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Bud Light: the choice is between incompetence and stupidity Alissa Heinerscheid's Career Limiting Move has limited someone else's career as well

We have previously noted how Anheuser-Busch executives have realized that the corporation completely f(ouled) up over using ‘transgender’ parody actor Dylan Mulvaney as a spokesthing for Bud Light, and how Bud Light’s Vice President for Marketing Alissa Heinerscheid has taken a “leave of absence” over the controversy.

Well, Mrs Heinerscheid hasn’t been the only casualty. From The Wall Street Journal:

Bud Light Brewer Puts Two Executives on Leave After Uproar Over Transgender Influencer

Alissa Heinerscheid, who oversaw Bud Light marketing, and her boss Daniel Blake placed on leave

By Ginger Adams Otis, Lauren Weber, and Jennifer Maloney | Updated: Sunday, April 23, 2023 | 4:26 PM EDT

Anheuser-Busch InBev SA BUD: (%) said it had placed on leave two executives who oversaw a Bud Light collaboration with a transgender activist. Continue reading →

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Harvard grad enters the unemployment line

We have previously noted the idiocy of Bud Light’s Vice President for Marketing Alissa Gordon Heinerscheid’s choice to use Dylan Mulvaney, the homosexual male who claims he’s a girl, and has been using a “365 Days of Girlhood” presentation — which I refuse to link — which completely mocks stereotypes of how real girls act, as the brand’s spokesthing. Well, now the digested food appears to have hit the air circulation device:

Bud Light’s Marketing Leadership Undergoes Shakeup After Dylan Mulvaney Controversy

Alissa Heinerscheid, who has led the brand since June, takes leave of absence and is replaced by Budweiser global marketing VP Todd Allen

by Jon Springer | Friday, April 21, 2023

Anheuser-Busch InBev has changed marketing leadership for Bud Light in the wake of controversy over the brand sending a can to transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney with her (sic) face on it.

Alissa Heinerscheid, marketing VP for the brand since June 2022, has taken a leave of absence, the brewer confirmed, and will be replaced by Todd Allen, who was most recently global marketing VP for Budweiser.

I did suggest, in the previous article, that Mrs Heinerscheid had made a “Career Limiting Mistake.” 🙂 Continue reading →

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People are investing in nice housing in parts of Philly, but if the city doesn’t address rampant crime, such will eventually cease.

Sometimes the real news is found in sections of the newspaper — and yes, I’m a newspaper reader, even if it’s just the digital editions! — in which you don’t expect it. From the Real Estate section of The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Apartment building proposed under the El adds even more transit-accessible housing in Fishtown

The 114-apartment building with a restaurant is planned for Front Street.

by Jale Blumgart | Thursday, April 20, 2023 | 5:00 AM EDT

A 114-unit apartment project is planned immediately adjacent to the Market-Frankford Line at 1440 N. Front St. on the border between Fishtown and South Kensington.

This is the latest, and largest, project from Archive Development, a new real estate company that’s been building in the Fishtown area since 2020. The project will contain 2,000 square feet of retail space, which the company wants to go to a restaurant.

“Front is one of the only streets in Fishtown where you can truly build with high density,” said Henry Siebert, cofounder of Archive. “We’ve seen it transition from a former industrial street with warehouses to a true, viable commercial corridor. That’s what attracted us.”

Amenities include a seventh floor “sky lounge,” with a kitchenette and a roof deck. It will also include a gym, coworking spaces, a dedicated conference room, and a ground floor garden. There will be five studios, 93 one-bedroom units, and 16 two-bedroom units.

There’s more at the original, but that apartment building better have some outrageous soundproofing. Who would want the sound of the El outside their windows?

Fishtown has been gentrifying for years, enough to have attracted the attention of Forbes:

How Fishtown, Philadelphia Became America’s Hottest New Neighborhood

Peter Lane Taylor[1]I cover luxury real estate, travel, hospitality, and entrepreneurs | May 2, 2018,09:52pm EDT

Every Friday afternoon at 5:30 pm the doors of “the El­”—one of America’s oldest elevated subways—swoosh open at Girard and Berks Street stations, unleashing a stampede of Millennials, yuppies, hipsters, entrepreneurs, and empty nesters onto Front Street.

As fast as the doors close, they scatter east down a maze of narrow streets swirling with trash, bumping shoulders with the occasional heroin addict and scrappers pushing shopping carts piled high with salvaged sheet metal. Nobody blinks.

A half dozen blocks away from their newly-built, half-million dollar townhomes, the lines twist out the doors at Pizzeria Beddia and Frankford Hall, two of Philadelphia’s hottest foodie spots. Across the street, Johnny Brenda’s is already packed—hosting as they have for over a decade one of America’s hottest indie rock bands. Mothers pushing strollers window shop past Lululemon along Frankford Avenue’s buzzing retail corridor fronted with wine bars, coffee shops, couture boutiques, yoga studios, a vintage motorcycle joint, and an Argentinian tango dance school.

Visually the dichotomies are jarring. Culturally the contradictions are even more confusing. Yet when the El disgorges its “New Fish” every afternoon it epitomizes the driving forces behind Fishtown’s warp-speed transformation, and the demographics fueling America’s new urban revolution.

There’s more at the original, including this photo, which I found interesting. Captioned as “An average night at Frankford Hall,” it shows the stereotypical young urban professionals at the Frankford Hall Hofbräu München German biergarten, a full courtyard of exclusively white — from what I could see — twenty-and-thirty-somethings. Philly is, overall, a very racially and ethnically diverse — and I’ve come to hate the word ‘diverse’ — cities, but, as the Inquirer previously reported, “Among the 30 biggest cities, Philadelphia is second only to Chicago in its level of residential segregation between Black and white residents, according to data from Brown University. Between Hispanic and white residents, it’s the sixth-most segregated.” And it’s only going to get worse.

But if Fishtown is gentrifying, an up-and-coming neighborhood, it’s right up against Kensington, Philly’s worst, or at least the one with the worst reputation, one so bad that the Mexican government used video of Kensington in an anti-drug ad campaign. And the 1440 North Front Street project is just 2.1 miles from the SEPTA elevated train station at Kensington and Allegheny Avenues.

Inquirer reporter Jake Blumgart spent a fair amount of space telling readers about the mass transit opportunities in the area, with this paragraph standing out:

Archive Development’s project on Front Street comes amid a construction boom directly adjacent to the Market Frankford elevated tracks. The El has struggled with low ridership, remote work trends, and a surge in antisocial behavior following the pandemic.

LOL! A “surge in antisocial behavior”? That’s a rather mild euphemism for shootings, assaults, and rampant drug use in SEPTA stations, with stations and transit cars filled with discarded needles.

There’s a choice that Philadelphia has to take, one which will determine the path our nation’s sixth largest city will follow. Will the city opt for actual law enforcement, and clean up Kensington and the Philadelphia Badlands, to enable further gentrification, wealth, and potential integration, or will it persist in non-enforcement, in excusing crime and leniently treating criminals, further depressing the depressed neighborhoods?

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↑1 I cover luxury real estate, travel, hospitality, and entrepreneurs