Category Archives: Freedom of Speech and of the Press

Posted on by

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.
Posted on by

The Philadelphia Inquirer scrubs race from its reporting . . . unless it’s politically useful.

We have frequently noted the censorship of The Philadelphia Inquirer, but this one takes it to an amusing level. According to her Inquirer biography — the newspaper puts the reporter’s bio at the bottom of every story in the digital edition — Valerie Russ said, “I write about history, race and identity, social justice, and neighborhoods.” Her Twitter biography says, “Valerie Russ writes about race, identity and neighborhoods for @PhillyInquirer, @TampaBayTimes alum, #Bison. RTs are not endorsements.”

So, race is obviously one of her major concerns. Yet when she wrote the Inquirer’s story about the killings in the City of Brotherly Love over the weekend, she dutifully scrubbed the race of the victims from her article:

Quadruple shooting, homicide part of another violent Philly weekend

Police are investigating several shootings over the weekend, including a homicide and the shooting of a 17-year-old.

by Valerie Russ | Sunday, January 29, 2023

One man was killed and several other young men were injured in multiple shootings over the weekend, including one in Northeast Philadelphia where four young men were shot Saturday night.

Police in the 19th District in West Philadelphia said a man in his 30s was shot Saturday night just after 11 p.m. on the 500 block of North Simpson Street. With gunshot wounds to his stomach and a leg, he was taken by a private car to Lankenau Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead shortly before 1 a.m. Sunday, police said.

In the quadruple shooting, three men in their early 20s and one 18-year-old were shot in the 1400 block of Kerper Street about 9 p.m. Saturday in the Oxford Circle neighborhood.

One of the men, a 20-year-old, was shot in the back, and the teenager in the right thigh, police said. Both were taken to Einstein Medical Center and were listed in stable condition.

The Philadelphia Police Department press release via email specified that the homicide victim was black. The same email report noted that the four victims in the quadruple shooting were all black males; Miss Russ deleted that information.

Further down:

At 11:01 p.m., police responded to a report of a shooting in the 1800 block of North Mascher Street in North Philadelphia. According to police, a 17-year-old male had opened a door to a Honda Civic and pointed a gun at two men, ages 26 and 29, who were inside the car. One of them had a licensed gun and shot at the 17-year-old several times, police said.The teenager was found in the 1700 block of North Mascher with gunshot wounds to his chest and right shoulder. Police called him a suspect in an apparent robbery attempt. He was taken to Temple in stable condition.

Miss Russ had available to her the report by the Philadelphia Police Department that the armed carjacker was black, and the intended victims were white, supposedly an area of concern for her, but she deleted that from her article.

We have pointed this censorship of the news previously, and it would not have led to a report by us, were it not for the fact that Miss Russ specializes in “race and identity, social justice, and neighborhoods.” The apparent editorial guidelines for not mentioning race in such stories seems to apply even to a reporter whose job it is to report on race. Kind of pegs the irony meter, doesn’t it?

Unless, of course, the inclusion of race is useful for the newspaper’s political position, as the Tyre Nichols case has been. At that point, race becomes totally relevant.

I’ve said it before: if I had Jeff Bezos’ money, I’d do what he did with The Washington Post: I’d buy the Inquirer and rescue it from its financial problems. But I would also clean house, I would make sure that the newspaper really did cover all the news, and publish all of the news, letting the chips fall where they may, regardless of whose feelings might get hurt. That’s what real journalists are supposed to do. With newspapers moving heavily toward digital rather than on-paper publishing, the space limitations of the past are mostly gone now, so newspapers really can publish all of the news.

As we reported earlier, even though it’s our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, and serving our sixth largest city and seventh largest metropolitan area, the Inquirer is failing, laying off people because it isn’t doing as much as breaking even. Perhaps, just perhaps, they’re doing something wrong?

Posted on by

Layoffs at the Inky

Normally, when media companies are forced to make layoffs, they self-report them. As we noted a month and a half ago, that’s what The Washington Post did. The Philadelphia Inquirer? Not so much. While Kevin Kinkead of Crossing Broad reported, on December 6, 2022, that “Philadelphia Inquirer ‘Will Need to Consider Layoffs’ if New Buyout Number isn’t Reached,” a site search for Inquirer layoffs, last conducted at 8:06 AM EDT this morning,, yielded nothing at all about impending layoffs.

But now, there’s this:

In a series of eight separate tweets, beginning here, Diane Mastrull, President of the NewsGuild of Greater Philadelphia, told us this:

It is with a mix of disgust and outrage that I report that four of our members, three from the newsroom and one from advertising, were laid off this morning.

We hear over and over how our ownership here at The Inquirer “is different,” that ownership by a nonprofit does not involve the same financial pressures as ownership by for-profit companies and greedy hedge funds.

And yet, look at us, doing the same unimaginative, inhumane thing as all those other owners: putting committed employees out of work.

What a dark day this is, coming on the heels of company meetings touting the excitement of the new office we’ll be opening next week. The nourishment stations! The chairs! The views!

None of it makes a damn bit of difference when you are a company sending employees to the unemployment line.

We sold a printing plant and got a $10 million forgivable pandemic-assist loan from the government, and still our leadership can’t figure out how to run this company without layoffs.

Cuts that follow the other kind: buyouts.

But what a view the new offices will have!

Just sayin’.

My heart breaks for our four members. Keep them in yours today — and prepare for a fight to get what we deserve at the bargaining table.

In solidarity,
@dmastrull

We have previously mentioned the begging letters that we receive from the Lenfest Institute for Journolism[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, oops, sorry, Journalism, asking for donations above and beyond the subscription price. The Leftist Lenfest Institute is the non-profit organization which owns the Inquirer, and not only do they believe we should contribute, but they also want the federal government to subsidize reporters’ salaries.

As a supporter of newspapers, of print journalism, due to my poor hearing, the last thing I want to see is newsrooms shrink and reporters and staff laid off. That said, The First Street Journal has been very critical of the Inquirer’s biased coverage, based on publisher Elizabeth Hughes stated goal of making the Inquirer an “anti-racist news organization,” because in the application of that, the newspaper has resorted to censoring the news.

The Inky went so far as to tell readers that it was a “white paper” in a “black city,” and would have to change, even though the 2020 census found that only 38.3% of the city were non-Hispanic black. If the Inky were trying to drive away white subscribers, this would have been an excellent way to do it!

The very #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 Inquirer, under Miss Hughes and Gabriel Escobar, the Executive Editor, does not want you to know about the daily bloodbath in the city’s streets. Instead, the publisher, the editor, and probably much of the staff want you to believe that the greatest threat of sudden death in the black community comes from a radical fringe of white mass killers, rather than from inside the community themselves. It suits their political agenda, but it has nothing to do with the truth.

The newspaper’s editorial slant is very heavily toward the left, the hard left actually. The Editorial Board have been all-in on homosexual and transgender activism, and former President Trump has been living, rent-free, in their heads for over six years now. The newspaper is pretty much a dedicated Democratic Party mouthpiece.

I’ve said it before: if I had Jeff Bezos’ money, I’d do what he did with The Washington Post: I’d buy the Inquirer and rescue it from its financial problems. But I would also clean house, I would make sure that the newspaper really did cover all the news, and publish all of the news, letting the chips fall where they may, regardless of whose feelings might get hurt. That’s what real journalists are supposed to do. With newspapers moving heavily toward digital rather than on-paper publishing, the space limitations of the past are mostly gone now, so newspapers really can publish all of the news.

Is the failure of the Inky to do that at least partially responsible for its financial woes? Did the four people who were laid off on Friday lose their jobs because America’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, the newspaper of record for our seventh largest metropolitan area has chosen not to report politically incorrect news?

Well, who can say, but the newspaper under its current leadership has not done much to make itself relevant to the majority of both city and metropolitan area residents. Yes, the advent of the 24-hour news networks and the internet have cut deeply into newspaper readership and subscriptions, and concomitantly into advertising revenue, but the Inquirer has managed to do a bang-up job of alienating more readers than some. As NewsGuild President Mastrull noted, the paper is owned by a supposedly non-profit journalism institute, but can’t even manage to break even.

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 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.
Posted on by

Would you believe that reading the ‘wrong’ book can get you in trouble at Stanford?

My copy of Mein Kampf.

Have you ever read Mein Kampf? I have, and I even own a copy. I also own copies of The Communist Manifesto, several of Vladlimr Il’ich Lenin’s pre-revolutionary works, the Q’ran, the Book of Mormon, and the old Lancer Books twelve paperback volume set of Conan stories. The fact that I own and have read some wildly contradictory books does not mean that I accept any or some of them as gospel; it means that I have read books.

My copy of Mein Kampf is an English translation by Ralph Manheim, copyrighted in 1943 by the Houghton Mifflin Company.

Adolf Hitler did not actually write the book. Rather, he paced around his cell in Landsberg am Lech prison, more making speeches, as oratory was his particular skill, than dictating it, to Rudolf Hess and Emil Maurice. As a result of this, Herr Hitler’s relatively uneducated German, and the difficulties in really translating German into English, it’s a hard slog of a read.

Nevertheless, it was a work of dynamic historical importance. But, history or not, it appears that some on the left are highly, highly! offended that someone would read it.

Report: Stanford student may need to ‘take accountability,’ ‘acknowledge harm’ for reading Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’

It looks to be a case study in how bias reporting systems chill speech. We’re seeking information and accountability from Stanford.

by Graham Piro and Alex Morey Wednesday, January 25, 2023

Reading a book on a college campus should not prompt formal administrative intervention. But that’s what’s reportedly happening at Stanford University this week, after a photo of a student reading Adolf Hitler’s autobiography, “Mein Kampf,” circulated on campus last Friday.

The Stanford Daily said over the weekend that administrators were working “swiftly” with the students involved to “address” the incident. Two campus rabbis emailed Jewish students saying administrators “are in ongoing conversation with the individuals involved, who are committed to and actively engaged in a process of reckoning and sincere repair.”

Stanford was reportedly alerted to the book-reading via its Protected Identity Harm reporting system. Effectively a bias response system, Stanford says PIH reports help the university “address incidents where a community member experiences harm because of who they are and how they show up in the world.”

In other words, a Special Snowflake™ say another student reading a copy of Mein Kampf and reported it to the University! His precious little feelings were hurted.

The PIH is “not a judicial or investigative process,” the Office of Student Affairs carefully notes in bold, before (properly) carving out exceptions for hate crimes and unlawful discrimination or harassment. “We hope to provide a path to resolution for the affected individuals or communities who need to heal” by having the students participate in one of a “menu” of exercises like “mediated conversations, restorative justice sessions, or Indigenous circle practices,” to “help move towards resolution.”

Because college students should not have to report to university authorities for merely reading a book — one, by the way, that has been required reading in at least one recent Stanford humanities class and is available to borrow from the university library — FIRE asked Stanford today to provide additional clarity about the way it handles these kinds of “harm” reports on campus.

Stanford defines a PIH Incident as “conduct or an incident that adversely and unfairly targets an individual or group” on the basis of actual or perceived characteristics like race, religion, or marital status. Yet, it acknowledges such conduct does not necessarily violate its harassment or discrimination policies that, quite rightly, already prohibit such unlawful conduct. What purpose does this separate process serve, then?

There’s more at the original.

There is at least a possibility that this was some sort of set-up, to expose the idiocy of Stanford’s system. That two “campus rabbis” were participating in this seems suspect to me, because such a system, if it can punish or intimidate students from reading Mein Kampf, could also be used, on a campus where so many students support the Palestinians, to report a student reading Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State.

But set-up or not, the fact that it has worked to expose the idiocy of the University’s system demonstrates that idiocy.

From The Stanford Daily:

University spokesperson Dee Mostofi confirmed that the Office of Student Affairs and the Office of Religious and Spiritual Life (ORL) became aware of this incident on Saturday. Mostofi added that the two offices, along with Stanford’s Hillel chapter, are working with the leaders of the residence that the students belong to address the social media post and its impact on the community.

“Swift action was taken by the leadership in the residential community where both the individuals who posted and the one pictured are members,” (Rabbi Jessica) Kirschner and (Rabbi Laurie) Hahn Tapper wrote. Student Affairs and ORL are actively working with students involved to address the issue and mend relationships in the community.

“It can be upsetting to hear about incidents like this,” Kirschner and Hahn Tapper wrote. “Jewish people belong at Stanford, and deserve to be respected by our peers.”

At some point, the students who got their precious little feelings hurt are going to have to leave the University and enter the working world, and won’t that be a shock for them!

Yeah, this still has the hallmarks of a set-up, but if it is, it’s a set-up that revealed real problems.

Posted on by

Taylor Lorenz loves to express her opinions, but doesn’t really want other people expressing their opinions back to her

Taylor Lorenz, from her Twitter profile.

We have previously mentioned Taylor Lorenz, who covers technology and online culture for The Washington Post. Miss Lorenz is probably most famous for her article doxing Chaya Raichik, the previously anonymous lady who ran the Twitter site Libs of TikTok. LoTT’s schtick is to find the silliest things leftists put on the social media site Tik Tok, and snark them for sensible people on Twitter. Basically, LoTT is mocking people for their own exposed stupidity. My good friend Amanda Marcotte of Salon loved that LoTT was doxed, doubtlessly hoping that Miss Raichik, a Brooklyn-based real estate salesperson and LoTT creator would lose her job — she wrote in September of 2021 that the unvaccinated should all lose their jobs, and retweeted it with the same message just four days ago — and posted back in April a hope that Elon Musk’s buyout of Twitter results in the whole thing being killed. Miss Lorenz was also appalled that the Biden Administration’s plans to open a Ministry of Truth Disinformation Governance Board within the Department of Fatherland Homeland Security.

Miss Lorenz previously told us that she was immunocompromised, though I have included that link to show that I once saw it; she has since deleted it. Thus, the image of one of her latest threads is just that, a screen captured image. Of course, it had to be screen capped because Miss Lorenz, who has her tweets protected and limited to her “approved followers” — Miss Lorenz has, as of this writing, 355,400 followers, but she follows only 8,674 people — both restricts those who can reply to it and set it so that her tweet cannot be retweeted. It is interesting that someone with the blue checkmark of being a high-profile person, who has the major public soapbox of a Washington Post reporter, and believed that Chaya Raichik needed to be doxed, has her tweets protected.

If it’s difficult to read what she tweeted, you can click on the image to enlarge it.

You know, I get it: Miss Lorenz is immunocompromised herself, and thus she has a personal reason to see the rest of us forcibly vaccinated and masked for the rest of our lives. But most people realize that the masks don’t really do much, and that the vaccines neither prevent people from contracting the virus nor prevent those who do contract it from transmitting it to others. And, as I have noted previously, it’s not just evil reich-wing American conservatives: in our family’s recent travels, we flew on Air Canada and Swissair, and were in airports in Toronto, Amsterdam, Aberdeen, Zurich, Tel Aviv, Istanbul and Kuwait City, and on neither any flights nor in any of those airports were there mask mandates, vaccine records checks, nor more than a small minority of people wearing masks voluntarily.

No, I don’t want Miss Lorenz to contract the SARS-CoV-2 virus. For the vast majority of people, as it was for me, it’s like an annoying cold or flu bug for a few days, but nothing debilitating. For someone immunocompromised as she is, it could be significantly worse. But there comes a point at which the vast majority of people cannot and should not have their rights and freedoms restricted for the benefit of a relatively few.

Posted on by

All the News That’s Fit to Print?

There has been so much written about the criminal cases against 33-year-old government worker William Dale Zulock Jr. and 35-year-old banker Zachary “Zack” Jacoby Zulock, accused of a whole series of child rape and sexual abuse crimes against the two boys they adopted, with some of the descriptions beggaring the imagination, that I’ve had to wonder just how much of the stories is true.

According to a copy of the 17-count indictment Townhall has obtained, the adoptive dads allegedly performed oral sex on both boys, forced the children to perform oral sex on them, and anally raped their sons. In at least one instance, the anal rape injured the older Zulock child, who just turned 11-years-old in mid-December. Court records indicate that the child sexual abuse stretches back to as early as late 2019 and intensified in January 2021, March 2021, and December 2021, as the offense dates are listed.

The brothers were enrolled in third and fourth-grade, respectively, before the men were caught in a midnight July bust at the Zulock mansion, which ended with Zachary tackled to the ground and William hauled out of the house naked by armed officers.

There’s disgustingly more at the original.

But the only stories I have seen about this have come from the conservative media. As is my habit, when I wonder about these things, I do website searches of the major credentialed media sources, and guess what I found. A site search for William Zulock on The New York Times website produced zero returns, as did one for William Dale Zulock.

The New York Post reported on the case, as did WSB-TV out of Atlanta, but a Washington Post site search for Zulock yielded nothing. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution did carry a story about the original arrest. Fox News had the story, but The Philadelphia Inquirer did not. The Walton County Sheriff’s Office released this arrest report.

Townhall reported that, “Zachary (is) a Biden voter and ardent Black Lives Matter advocate who championed left-wing causes on Facebook,” so yeah, he’s certainly guilty! 🙂

The Daily Mail reported that Zachary Zulock was accused of raping a 14-year-old boy in 2011, but that the case was never properly investigated and was dropped. That does lead to the obvious question, one the credentialed media would be all over if the Zulocks had been Republicans: how seriously did the “Christian special needs adoption” agency investigate the prospective adoptive parents?

So, how do we explain the fact that The New York Times, with its long-time blurb, “All the News That’s Fit to Print” didn’t print this news? Thanks to the internet, the story is a national one, and one published in New York City; there’s no way the editors of the Times didn’t know about it. Was it perhaps not fit to print because the accusations against the Zulocks are so disgusting, or was it not fit to print because it might lead to increased anti-homosexual attitudes?

Yes, that was a rhetorical question; we all know the answer.

It’s really pretty clear: the credentialed media don’t actually lie, at least not much, but they are very good at declining to publish the things which go against their editorial slant. If it’s news that they don’t want you to read, they won’t publish it.

Posted on by

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.
Posted on by

It’s no wonder newspapers are failing; too many of them are being run as failures!

It was back in the 1960s when I delivered the old Lexington Herald morning, and Lexington Leader afternoon newspapers in my hometown of Mt Sterling, Kentucky. And delivering the newspapers meant every day, and I mean every day: Christmas, New Year’s, and Easter Sunday.

The two merged in 1983 to form the morning Lexington Herald-Leader, but that was long after I ceased delivering newspapers; my best friend used to call it the Herald-Liberal. Still, it was an every day publication. I left Lexington, and the Bluegrass State completely, at the end of 1984.

With the general decline of newspapers, it is hardly a surprised that the Herald-Leader declined as well. At some point prior to my return to Kentucky, the newspaper ceased publishing a physical edition on Saturdays. Out in the boondocks, I cannot get a physical newspaper delivered anyway, so my subscription to the paper is digital only.

Perhaps it’s the fact that I delivered the newspaper every day that makes this a bit more annoying to me, but not only is there no fresh newspaper on Saturdays, with the exception of sports, there’s little reporting as well. That isn’t too surprising: if it weren’t for University of Kentucky sports reporting, primarily basketball reporting, the newspaper might have failed completely!

But this is getting kind of ridiculous! The image to the right is from the left side of the newspaper’s website, and was screen captured at 9:39 AM EST on Monday, January 2, 2023, and it shows, under the “Latest News” heading, one story from 1:00 PM on January 1st, two from December 31st, and one from December 30th. To the right of that are seven highlighted stories, with photos along with the headlines, four of which are dated January 1st . . . and all four are UK sports stories. The three non-sports stories are all dated December 30th.

What, did nothing of importance happen outside of sports on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day?

I’ve mentioned this previously: with my significantly degraded hearing, I need to read the news, not listen to it on television. More, when I read the news, if something is unclear to me on teh first pass, I can go back and read it again, to make certain I got the meaning clearly. That’s why I waste so much money spend so much for subscriptions, to The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Wall Street Journal, and yes, to the Lexington Herald-Leader. While certainly not my only sources, they are the ones I use most frequently on this poor site. You can see the “Subscriber Edition” notation on my screen capture of the newspaper’s logo at the left.

Those other newspapers? Their journalists work seven days a week. Oh, I’m sure that they actually get days off, but there are reporters and staff writers covering the news — and not just sports — every day of the year. The Herald-Leader is much smaller, but man, you’d think that somebody would be covering the news every day!

I get it: everybody wants holidays off. My wife certainly does, but as a registered nurse working in a hospital, well, hospitals don’t get to close for holidays and weekends, and Mrs Pico got to work Christmas Day this year. Surely, surely! the Bluegrass State’s second-largest newspaper ought to have somebody other than UK sports reporters working on the holidays! If publishers are wondering why they are failing, yes, television news and the internet are killing them, but the fact that so many are being run as though they are failing is hurting them as well.

Posted on by

Killadelphia: It’s the last update of 2022 But The Philadelphia Inquirer is still trying to obscure the truth.

The Philadelphia Police Department have released their last ‘official’ homicide report for the year, showing that 514 people have spilled out their life’s blood in the city’s mean streets. Oh, there’ll be another report tomorrow, generated by computer to update past year’s daily numbers, but the current year’s numbers are updated only Monday through Friday, meaning that Friday’s numbers won’t be included on Saturday’s report, now will New Year’s Eve’s numbers on the Sunday report.

We might not even get the yearly total on Monday, because New Year’s Day, a government holiday, occurs on Sunday, and whomever in the Philadelphia Police Department updates the statistics will be allowed to take his holiday on Monday; that’s what happened on December 26th, the Monday after Christmas Day.

In 2021, there were five total murders on December 30th and 31st.

Of course, with a final number which will fit within the range I projected three days ago, 514 to 521, there’s no particular reason to fudge the numbers the way that some have alleged happened at the end of 2020, where an initial report of 502 was downgraded to 499. With the second-place number being an even 500, set during the crack cocaine wars of 1990, and the record of 562 set last year, this year’s 514 to 521 will be securely in between those two, so there’d no advantage to any downgrade.

If anything, a homicide or two committed early enough on New Year’s Day might as well be added to 2022’s statistics, in the hope that 2023 can come in under 500; that’s something I can easily see happening.

But, regardless of what the final number is, there’s no escaping one simple fact: under Mayor Jim Kenney, District Attorney Larry Krasner, and Police commissioner Danielle Outlaw, the City of Brotherly Love have averaged 525 homicides per year, assuming that the current 514 is the final number for this year. Assuming that 514 is the end number for 2022, for the Kenney-Krasner-Outlaw triumvirate to average under 500, the city would have to see a homicide number for 2023 down to 421. Of course, for every homicide added to the 2022 total, that 421 number decreases by one.

It’s so bad that even The Philadelphia Inquirer noted this year’s numbers, though, of course, they never did the real math to note the average that the law enforcement triumvirate have racked up.

Philly’s gun violence remained at record levels for the third straight year

Philadelphia had recorded 512 homicides this year through Tuesday, police said, and nearly 1,800 people were shot and survived.

by Ellie Rushing and Chris Palmer | Thursday, December 29, 2022

When Taneesha Brodie’s eldest son turned 8, she moved her family out of North Philadelphia to Upper Darby, seeking a safer community away from the city’s gun violence.

She was proud of the people her children became, especially her eldest, Quenzell Bradley-Brown. A married father of four, the 28-year-old spent four years in the National Guard reserves, then worked two jobs and often performed hip-hop, poetry, and comedy at open mic nights.

In February, Bradley-Brown and his family moved back into the city, to Overbrook Park, for more affordable housing and to be closer to his elderly grandmother.

Brodie worried at first, but considered the area to be relatively safe.

Seven months later, her son was dead.

Quenzell Bradley-Brown was apparently a victim of a mistaken identity killing, and remains unsolved, as are hundreds more. With a mostly uncooperative public who hate the police, a police department around 600 officers undermanned, and a probable next mayor who hates cops, who can reasonably expect that number to get better?

Many subsequent paragraphs give us some of the statistics and references, before article authors Ellie Rushing and Chris Palmer go off the reservation:

Arguments and drug-related feuds remained the predominant motives in homicides, according to police statistics. But authorities also pointed to ongoing gang conflicts, social media posts, retaliation or revenge, and domestic violence.

We have several times mocked the Inquirer for recently claiming that there were no real gangs in the city. We were reliably informed by the Inquirer that there are no gangs in the city, just “cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families,” who sometimes had “beefs” with other cliques, so we must replace the term “gang-bangers” with “cliques of young men” or “clique beefers”. District Attorney Larry Krasner and his office seem to prefer the term “rival street groups.” But, the embedded link led to another article, from just 11 days ago, in which Miss Rushing was one of the authors, along with Rodrigo Torrejón, telling of the violence not of gangs, but “West Philadelphia street groups.” They did use the word “gang” one time, but it appears to simply have been a matter of prose, because they’d already used “street group” in the sentence:

Lacey-Woodson and Mickens, affiliated with the street group “02da4,” were targeting a member of the rival gang “524″ and opened fire on the party, said Jeffrey Palmer, an assistant district attorney with the Gun Violence Task Force, which headed the investigation.

Unless I missed it, which is always possible, that was the only use of the word “gang” in the article. There were plenty of subsequent references to “street groups” and “groups” in the article.

Obviously, there was some editorial ‘guidance’ in this. While the article headline and subheading are “West Philly street group members charged for their roles in five different shootings: The rash of violence was part of ongoing feuds between feuding West Philadelphia street groups, authorities said,” the original article title, visible by hovering your cursor over the article tab, was “West Philadelphia gang members arrested in Sircarr Johnson Jr., Salahaldin Mahmoud fatal shooting”, and the article url is https://www.inquirer.com/news/sircarr-johnson-west-philadelphia-gang-arrests-july-4-shooting-20221219.html.

Translation: what I have often referred to as 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. is, I assume to follow Publisher and Chief Executive Officer Elizabeth ‘Lisa’ Hughes directives to be an “antiracist news organization“, the word “gang” is apparently racist. Perhaps, for Miss Hughes, the word “gang” draws into the minds of readers an image of black gangs, or perhaps it’s simply that, for her, the truth is racist.

The Enquirer, oops, sorry, Inquirer really doesn’t like investigating the truth. The paper will never report the numbers I use, all from documented sources, to note how the current law enforcement triumvirate have failed, nor have they, at least as far as I could find, mentioned what Ben Mannes reported on Broad + Liberty, that the homicide numbers are obvious fudges, given the high number of obvious homicides that remain classified as ‘suspicious,’ and not counted in the official homicide statistics.  When the Lenfest Institute, which owns the Inky, sends out begging letters which state that “It is impossible to have a democratic society without a free press that informs citizens,” and “Reporters at The Inquirer are dedicated to speaking truth to power and delivering you news that makes Philadelphia a better place,” one ought to expect that the reporters who are dedicated to speaking truth to power would do something really radical and investigate what that truth really is.

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.