Category Archives: Journolism

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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.
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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.

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They can’t handle the truth!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Marcus Hayes | Wednesday, January 18, 2023

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

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

Oh, how far we’ve come.

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

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

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

So, because Ivan Vladimirovich Provorov is a Russian Orthodox Christian, Mr Hayes states, pretty definitively, that Ivan Vladimirovich — who has the same patronymic name as Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin! — does not believe that homosexuals should even exist, because Patriarch Kirill believes that homosexual relations are a sin. A real journalist would have recognized that; a journolist[1]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading like Mr Hayes would not.

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

References
↑1 The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
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Killadelphia’s Democratic mayoral candidates do not want the killing to stop They must want the killings to continue, because they keep advocating the policies which have enabled more crime

When #woke[1]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading journolists[2]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading write the news, it tends to fall into the category of GI/GO: garbage in, garbage out. It was the subtitle of this article from what I have frequently called The Philadelphia Enquirer[3]RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt. that told us that the leftward bias of the newspaper was going to force it into irrelevance.

Philly’s next mayor will inherit an unprecedented gun violence crisis. Here’s how it’s defining the race.

The Democrats running today must strike a balance that many of their predecessors did not: they must show they can fight crime while maintaining the criminal-justice reforms most of them supported.

by Anna Orso | Wednesday, January 11, 2022

Crime has been a top political issue in Philadelphia for as long as anyone can remember, but few recall a time when it was quite this salient.

The subtitle, the Democratic candidates “must show they can fight crime while maintaining the criminal-justice reforms most of them supported” tells us everything: it takes on the assumption that Philly’s terrible crime rate can be fought while continuing with those “criminal justice reforms” left in place. More, it assumes that those ‘progressive’ “criminal justice reforms” did not contribute to the increase in crime.

While I have previously criticized Anna Orso’s reporting, article headlines are traditionally written not by the reporter, but by an editor. In this case, the original headline was “Philadelphia mayor’s race: how gun violence crisis is defining campaigns”, as you can see if you hover your cursor over the tab in your browser. I cannot assign the responsibility for that subtitle to her, even though she could have been the one who wrote it.

Homicides climbed to all-time highs over the last two years, and thousands more people survived shootings. Carjackings and vehicle thefts have skyrocketed, and the Police Department has hundreds of vacancies. Residents of long-neglected neighborhoods report often feeling unsafe, and many say the city feels as if it’s at a crossroads.

And nine Democrats are vying to run it.

I’ll point out the history here: Philadelphia’s last Republican mayor left office while President Harry Truman was still in office. Those city mayors in the chart above? All Democrats! The chance that a Republican will be elected in November is almost vanishingly small.

As the Philadelphia mayor’s race takes shape ahead of the May primary election, all the candidates agree: Public safety is the No. 1 issue. What they’ll debate now is how to lead Philadelphia out of the shootings crisis — and they’ll do so in a city that just two years ago saw a mass protest movement challenge the role of law enforcement.

It means Democrats running for the nomination must strike a balance many of their predecessors did not. They must show they can fight the urgent gun violence problem, and also tackle the long-standing societal factors that drive it. They must set the agenda for the Police Department and also the city’s antiviolence programs.

That last embedded link? It’s not just a throwaway, but leads to a previous story, one in which Miss Orso is listed as a co-author, in which the Inquirer blames the existing problems not on the rotten behavior of the current residents and gang members cliques of young men,[4]We were reliably informed by The Philadelphia Inquirer that there are no gangs in the city, just “cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families,” who sometimes … Continue reading but on real-estate “redlining”, community disinvestment, and poverty. There’s not a single word about children born to single mothers, about absent and frequently unknown fathers, or empty churches. Nothing was said about parents rearing children with no values or morals or ethics. In a Lord of the Flies culture among those “cliques of young men”, there isn’t a single word about children growing up with little or no parental supervision, the overarching theme of Lord of the Flies in the first place.

Former Councilmember Helen Gym, seen as the most progressive candidate in the race, centered her campaign announcement speech on public safety, saying violence is “destroying our city and our people.” She’s focused largely on expanding social programs and tailoring them to young people.

Mrs Flaherty,[5]Although Helen Gym Flaherty doesn’t have enough respect for her husband to have taken his name, at The First Street Journal we do not show similar disrespect. as Miss Orso told us, is the furthest left of the Democratic candidates, a supporter of the leftist defense attorney who is Philadelphia’s District Attorney “Let ’em Loose” Larry Krasner, and has supported both significant ‘decarceration,’ turning more criminals loose, and ‘defunding the police.’ That the ‘social programs’ she favors have done no good in the literally decades that Philadelphia individually, and the country as a whole, have been applying them, is not a question Miss Orso raised.

Joseph P. McLaughlin, an adviser to two former mayors, said he’d recommend a mayoral candidate running in 2023 avoid being dismissive of law enforcement and work to separate themselves from the “defund the police” movement. The slogan that refers to diverting law enforcement funding to social services was adopted by racial justice protesters in 2020, and local officials across the country — mostly Democrats — backed versions of the idea.

“Whatever you think of the particular policy,” McLaughlin said, “the headline on it was a disaster for Democrats.”

It has arguably been a ‘disaster for Democrats’ in competitive elections, but once a Democratic nominee is selected, it no longer matters, not in Philadelphia; if the Republicans nominated Jesus, and Satan was running as the Democrat, Satan would win in the City of Brotherly Love, and it wouldn’t even be close.

Still, tough-on-crime rhetoric or strategies that call for increasing funding to the Police Department may not sit well with the city’s growing and well-organized progressive movement, which has notched notable electoral wins over the last five years, including elevating District Attorney Larry Krasner to office.

“The message of ‘more police are going to solve this, more prisons will solve this’ is out of touch,” said Robert Saleem Holbrook, executive director of the Abolitionist Law Center. “Philadelphia has a very strong movement that is opposed to that and is not going to accept any kind of talk like that from these candidates.”

The Abolitionist Law Center, huh? They very honestly tell you what they are about, which is “abolishing class and race based mass incarceration”. As many criminals as Mr Krasner has sprung from prison — and shooting and homicides have both risen dramatically as the incarcerated population have dropped — many of whom have wound up committing new crimes, you would think that if ‘decarceration’ worked to reduce crime, crime would have come down.

I began this article by slamming Miss Orso, but in a way, it really wasn’t fair: she was reporting on the political positioning of the candidates for the Democratic nomination for Mayor, and it wasn’t really her job to point out that their common problem would be that their proposed policies are all terrible.

In the meantime, there was this:

16-year-old boy killed in North Philadelphia shooting

The killing on West Erie Avenue in North Philadelphia on Wednesday could have connections to a non-fatal shooting of another 16-year-old boy two days earlier, police said.

by Jason Laughlin | Wednesday, January 11, 2023 | 7:32 PM EST

A 16-year-old boy was shot to death in North Philadelphia Wednesday night, and police said the shooting could have ties to another shooting of a teenager in the neighborhood just two days earlier.

The 16-year-old, whom the Philadelphia Police Department did not identify, was found shot multiple times in an empty lot on the 1400 block of West Erie Avenue about 5:25 p.m. Wednesday. He was taken to Temple University Hospital and pronounced dead there about a half hour later.

Shell casings gathered at the scene suggested at least 11 shots were fired just half a block from Broad Street and Erie Avenue, a bustling commercial intersection in North Philadelphia. When the shots fired people scattered, said Philadelphia Police Chief Inspector Scott Small, and the teenager, already shot, ran to the vacant lot where he collapsed. It was unclear how many shooters were involved, Scott said.

Police are investigating whether the killing Wednesday is related to a shooting nearby Monday night, Small said. In that shooting, another 16-year-old male was shot in the leg at 15th Street and Erie Avenue. He survived. That victim and the teenager killed Wednesday appeared to have known each other, Small said. Both lived in that neighborhood, he said.

There’s more at the original, but one thing is clear: decarceration, anti-violence initiatives, and social programs won’t do anything, not as long as 16-year-olds are out running in gangs “street groups”, and won’t mean a thing if parents aren’t rearing their children properly. It takes two parents to bring up children properly, a mother and a father, and it takes parents with a strong moral, ethical, and yes, religious foundation.

And there is one more thing. All of the Democrat politicians in Philly are fully supportive of abortion. But what is abortion other than teaching children that other children are disposable? Was the probably teenaged shooter who slew the 16-year-old really doing anything different from the pregnant women ‘terminating’ their pregnancies in the city’s abortion clinics? The shooter was just engaged in a sixteen-years-late abortion. As we see the supporters of prenatal infanticide telling us that abortion is a good thing, helping women to avoid a disruption in their lives, helping them to maintain their chosen career paths, don’t think that the children in Philly don’t see that as well, don’t get the message that a child can be simply gotten rid of because he might happen to be inconvenient.

References

References
↑1 From Wikipedia:

Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues.
By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.

↑2 The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
↑3 RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt.
↑4 We were reliably informed by The Philadelphia 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“. Even after the widespread mockery the Inquirer has received over this, they were still avoiding the word “gang” in preference for “street groups” and “groups.”
↑5 Although Helen Gym Flaherty doesn’t have enough respect for her husband to have taken his name, at The First Street Journal we do not show similar disrespect.
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Killadelphia Is The Philadelphia Inquirer trying to keep the truth hushed up to protect Democrats?

I noted, just five days ago, that I saw a mathematical possibility, at the margin of error, that the City of Brotherly Love could finish very slightly below 500 homicides in 2022. That was based upon the decrease in the rate of killings since Hallowe’en.

Alas! while the rate of killings still isn’t in the 2021 range, it has picked up once again, and the math makes it seem impossible now. With 488 killings as of 11:59 PM EST on Sunday, December 11, 2022, Philly is now seeing 1.4145 murders per day; that works out to 516.29 murders for the year. And with at least six homicides over the last three days, the city has seen 43 murders in the 41 days since Hallowe’en. At that rate, 1.0488 per day, times thee 20 days left in the year, yields 20.98 homicides in these last three weeks. If there are 21 homicides in the last 20 days, that would end the year with 509 murders.

But that is working with the official homicide numbers, and Broad + Liberty, along with other outlets, broke the story of the uncounted deaths in the city, showing at least 101 “suspicious” deaths, in a photo taken just before Thanksgiving. That the credentialed media didn’t want to report that is evidenced by the fact that, since the story broke, The Philadelphia Inquirer, our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, winner of twenty Pulitzer Prizes, and the supposed newspaper of record for the area, and one which believes it is so important that the federal government should subsidize it, has nothing on that story, even though it was published four days ago, on a subject that would seem pretty serious and significant. Checking the Inquirer’s website main page, specific crime page, and doing a site search for suspicious deaths, as of 9:45 AM EST today showed no stories on the subject at all. Did the Inky investigate at all? Did Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw tell them that it was nothing, don’t worry about it? Did the top officers clam up?

You’d think that a leak like this, from someone inside the Philadelphia Police Department, would have piqued the interest of real journalists, especially the police-hating #woke of the Inquirer, but if you actually thought that, you’d be wrong, wrong, wrong!

Who knows, perhaps the unauthorized leak from someone in the Police Department was a fake, a political attack. If so, wouldn’t the journolists[1]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading want to expose that? After all, it’s a serious accusation, one which attacks the political leadership of the Police Department and the city as a whole . . . and Philadelphia hasn’t had a Republican mayor since Harry Truman was President.

Oh, wait, that’s it: the editors of the Inky don’t want anything which could hurt the Democrats made public.

References

References
↑1 The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
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They thought we wouldn’t notice, but we did.

Ever since Powerline and Little Green Footballs spotted the use of forged documents by CBS News 60 Minutes, in their attempt to swing the 2004 election away from President Bush and toward Senator John Kerry (D-MA), the credentialed media were, or at least should have been, put on alert that there were eyes on them, looking for the kind of bovine feces they had long been peddling. And so you’d think that the editors of The Washington Post would have learned that lesson by now, 18 years later.

So, when James Woods tweeted a screen capture from the Post, it was going to live forever, regardless of how the editors tried to soften the headline. It didn’t work.

Covid is no longer mainly a pandemic of the unvaccinated. Here’s why.

Analysis by McKenzie Beard | Wednesday, November 23, 2022 | 7:46 AM EST

For the first time, a majority of Americans dying from the coronavirus received at least the primary series of the vaccine.

Fifty-eight percent of coronavirus deaths in August were people who were vaccinated or boosted, according to an analysis conducted for The Health 202 by Cynthia Cox, vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation.

It’s a continuation of a troubling trend that has emerged over the past year. As vaccination rates have increased and new variants appeared, the share of deaths of people who were vaccinated has been steadily rising. In September 2021, vaccinated people made up just 23 percent of coronavirus fatalities. In January and February this year, it was up to 42 percent, per our colleagues Fenit Nirappil and Dan Keating.

If you hover your cursor on the Post’s article title, you’ll see the hyperlink for it, and see that it was originally https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/23/vaccinated-people-now-make-up-majority-covid-deaths/, “Vaccinated people now make up majority (of) covid deaths”. I am reminded of Tony Stark’s line in the first Avengers movie, “That man is playing Galaga. He thought we wouldn’t notice, but we did.”

You can read the rest at the link, and if the Post’s paywall stymies you, another site has copied it.

Also see: William Teach: Vaccinated Account For Majority Of Wuhan Flu Deaths

Let’s be clear about this: the original headline would grab far more attention than the revised one, and part of a headline writer’s job — articles in newspapers traditionally have an editor rather than the author compose it — is to write a headline which is accurate but will still grab the reader’s attention and make it more probable that he will read the article.

But the original title very much undercuts what William Teach noted yesterday, “World Leaders Sign Declaration to Introduce COVID Vaccine Passports“:

At this year’s G20 Summit in Indonesia, the twenty participating world leaders signed a declaration to introduce vaccine passports for their respective jurisdictions, with the stated intention of creating a global verification system to facilitate safe international travel. (snip)

In a statement, the leaders affirmed their respective countries’ support of the World Health Organization mRNA Vaccine Technology Transfer hub, which aims to build capacity in low- and middle-income countries to produce mRNA vaccines.

The leaders said they welcome joint production and research of vaccines and acknowledge the importance of shared technical standards and verification methods.

They also agreed to a globalised ‘vaccination passport’.

While the details are scant at this stage, the statement says this will be done under the framework of the International Health Regulations to “facilitate seamless international travel, interoperability, and recognizing digital solutions and non-digital solutions, including proof of vaccinations.”

Indonesia’s Health Minister Budi Gunadi Sadikin said that a Digital Health Certificate using World Health Organization standards would be introduced during the next World Health Assembly in Geneva, in May next year.

“If you have been vaccinated or tested properly, you can move around. So for the next pandemic, instead of stopping the movement of people 100%, you can still provide some movement of the people,” Mr Sadikin said.

So, it’s somewhat alarming that governments – and of those belonging to the G20, the majority represent democracies – would consider introducing a passport that, since it was first mooted by individual countries, been widely condemned as medical discrimination as well as a violation of privacy with serious ethical implications.

Of more concern are reports that the vaccine won’t just apply to Covid vaccinations, but also to any vaccination that WHO recommends is required for international travel.

But if the SARS-CoV-2 virus is simply bypassing the vaccinations, something we have known for a year now, there is really no purpose in requiring vaccine passports, at least no real medical purpose. There is, as always, a Control Of People purpose. The editors of the Post have no real objections to more government control over the public, at least not if that control is exercised in the direction they like.

Between my wife and I, we’ve been in the Netherlands, Scotland, Canada, Israel and Switzerland — three of them just airport layovers, but there was nothing stopping us from leaving the airport in those countries — in the past two months, and neither of us has ever been asked for our vaccination records. We did carry them with us, in case they were required, but I, for one, was very happy that the busybodies and Karens didn’t ask. We were not asked for such when we returned to the United States.

While we have the stupid COVID-19 vaccination records, being relatively recent, how many people have their childhood vaccination records? Sure, I had all of the childhood vaccinations when I was a child, but that stuff was sixty years ago. The physicians who administered them are all probably dead, their offices gone. The school I attended from third grade through high school closed after the 1976 school year; where would those vaccination records be?

The vaccines are available for free, and anybody who wants to take them can do so. What the government does not like is the fact that those who do not want to take them have the right not to take them, so our government, and other governments, want to add more coercive pressure on those who decline.

I am not opposed to the vaccines, and am vaccinated myself. But I am very much opposed to the government trying to coerce people, trying to use force to get people to comply. A nation which has individual liberty as its standard should never, ever do that, and should always be resisted.

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Republicans take control of the House of Representatives; Vanity Fair writer waxes wroth If there's one thing the left despise, it's populism

The Democrats in the House of Representatives, the ones who created the silly Capitol Kerfuffle Committee, the one which almost all Republicans refused to join, are just terribly, terribly worried that, now that the GOP have regained the majority, they’ll, Horrors! investigate Democrats.

Remember Paul Ryan? He was House Speaker in 2018, the last time Republicans were in control. He left Congress quietly in the middle of the night. Well, not really, but sort of. Blaming “identity politics” and “polarization,” Ryan abruptly announced in April 2018 that he’d be exiting at the end of his term the following January, just as Democrats assumed power. Ryan went on to join the board overseeing the place that helped cause so much of that polarization in the first place, Fox News. Ryan may have reaped the benefits of Donald Trump moving into the White House—tax cuts!—but he didn’t have the stomach for MAGA. The same cannot be said for “my Kevin,” the little nickname the former president has given to Kevin McCarthy.

McCarthy helped rehabilitate Trump after the January 6 riots with a visit weeks later to Mar-a-Lago, where the two grinned side by side for a photo op. As fellow Republican Liz Cheney pointed out after McCarthy’s trip, “He’s not just a former president. He provoked an attack on the Capitol, an attack on our democracy. And so I can’t understand why you would want to go rehabilitate him.”

Here’s where Vanity Fair’s paywall begins, but, if you have only checked in for one of their articles in a month (?), you’ll still be able to access it for free. That’s how I did it; I would certainly never pay for it!

There is, of course, the amusing point of referring to Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY At Large) as Representative Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA 22) “fellow republican,” when Miss Cheney decided to abandon all party loyalty and accept Nancy Pelosi’s appointment to the January 6th committee.

Wyoming was President Trump’s strongest state in the 2020 elections, but Miss Cheney hated him. Despite having won re-election in 2020 with 66% of the vote, her participation in the Democrats’ witch hunt had her lose the 2022 Republican primary to Harriet Hageman by a landslide margin. Molly Jong-Fast Greenfield’s[1]Although the author does not respect her husband, Matthew Greenfield, enough to have taken his name, The First Street Journal does not show similar disrespect, and always refers to married women by … Continue reading article, which is based heavily on sources from not just the Democrats in the House, but the farthest left Democrats, is so ridiculously biased that her calling Miss Cheney Mr McCarthy’s “fellow Republican” is more of a mockery than an accurate description.

Maybe because McCarthy was desperate for the Speakership?

Now, with Republicans winning a slim majority in the midterms, that guy could be Speaker of the House—and honestly that’s the best-case scenario. McCarthy may be a cowardly sycophant, but he’s not full MAGA, something that MAGA-world is very much aware of. Though McCarthy won the Republican nomination for speaker on Tuesday, with 188 votes, dozens of members voted for Freedom Caucus member Rep. Andy Biggs—a signal that McCarthy might have to make major concessions to the party’s far-right flank in order to secure 218 votes before the full Congress in early January.

Yeah, referring to Mr McCarthy as a “cowardly sycophant” is going to help! 🙂

Meanwhile, the queen of MAGA, Marjorie Taylor Greene, is more than ready for Republicans to be in charge and apparently expects the likely next Speaker to appease the base. Regarding McCarthy, she told The New York Times that “to be the best Speaker of the House and to please the base, he’s going to give me a lot of power and a lot of leeway.” She even predicted Monday that she’d be on committees investigating “traitors and criminals.” McCarthy has said he plans to put Greene back on committees, with some of her Trumpworld allies reportedly urging the likely Speaker to give her a plum seat on the House Oversight Committee. Imagine, from promoting QAnon conspiracies to possibly landing a key oversight post in Congress.

“We have to have the gavel,” Greene said Tuesday in discussing her support for McCarthy. “That is extremely important, because the gavel means subpoena power. And Republicans need subpoena power going over the next two years.”

Mrs Greenfield was in no way offended when Democrats had the subpoena power!

For Democrats, the outlook of a GOP-led House is grim. As Democratic representative Eric Swalwell texted me, “The GOP has laid a historic egg. Democrats ran on competence and contrasted it with chaos. And if Kevin McCarthy somehow holds on to become Speaker, he’s no Nancy Pelosi who can lead a narrow majority. McCarthy would be the leader of the land of misfit toys, a place that will exist exclusively as a vessel state of MAGA nation. A MAGA House majority will also operate as the largest law firm in Washington, DC, but serving just one client and his endless grievances. Functionally, without a Democratic votes it will spectacularly fail to execute its core functions: keep the government open, pay America’s bills, and fund the fight for freedom in Ukraine.”

I would imagine that the House under the GOP will keep the government open — though I would hope that they’d try to eliminate some of the stupid functions — but “fund the fight for freedom in Ukraine”? Try fund the struggle to make nuclear war more probable, because that’s how I see it. Sure, we all want Russia to somehow lose the Russo-Ukrainian War, but for some of us, including me, not at the expense of making a nuclear war more probable.

There’s more at the original, but what Mrs Greenfield tells us, almost as an aside, tells us a lot about her biases. Eric Swalwell, Ro Khanna, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, all congressmen who know where to go for a sympathetic journolist[2]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading, reached out to her via text. Richie Torres, “first openly gay Afro-Latino elected to Congress,” is cited as calling Representatives Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Tayor Greene as “lunatic likes”. I’m just surprised that Mus Greenfield failed to mention Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO), but, then again, Mrs Boebert’s race had not been decided by last Wednesday, when she published the article. Mrs Boebert was re-elected, though by just a few hundred votes.

There are several more paragraphs but none of it is sensible reporting; it’s simply more Democratic propaganda masquerading — though not very well — as a measured and sensible opinion piece.

What Mrs Greenfield and the rest simply don’t understand is that the Republican electorate has moved on from the go-along-to-get-along politicians, and is now solidly populist in outlook. The attitudes of Representatives like Mrs Greene, Mrs Boebert, and Mr Gaetz are the attitudes of the majority of Republican voters. We saw this in 2010, with the emergence of the short-lived TEA Party, rebelling against President Obama’s stimulus and socialized medicine programs, but the TEA Party movement failed to last, dominated in Congress by the more polite Republicans.

Now the populists are the apparent majority of Republican voters, and that means that more populists are among the elected Republican office holders. And the left really, really, really don’t like that.

Donald Trump is mortal. More than just mortal, he’s very overweight and eats terrible food. The populist idea in the United States will outlive him.

References

References
↑1 Although the author does not respect her husband, Matthew Greenfield, enough to have taken his name, The First Street Journal does not show similar disrespect, and always refers to married women by their proper names.
↑2 The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
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NY Times Is Here To Tell You How To Save Money On Your Biden Inflated Power Bills

This is what it’s come down to: the Times and so many other Credentialed Media outlets telling you how to maybe save money, rather than castigating the Government to stop being part of the problem, namely, policies that cause energy prices to go higher (paywalled Times article here)

How to Save on High Heating Bills This Winter

The cost of heating a home is expected to spike this winter as higher prices for natural gas and heating oil combine with a forecast for slightly colder weather than last winter.

But financial help is often available for paying bills as well for updating heating systems to more efficient models. There are also steps to take to conserve energy.

The average cost of heating a home is estimated to rise almost 18% from last winter, to $1,208, according to the National Energy Assistance Directors Association. The group coordinates state policy for federal grants that help low-income families pay heating and cooling bills.

The estimated seasonal bill for natural gas, which about half of Americans use to heat their homes, is $900, up 25% from last winter, according to the most recent data from the federal Energy Information Administration. Natural gas has become pricier because of factors such as greater demand for cooling during this year’s scorching summer (natural gas powers plants that produce electricity to run air conditioners) and surging exports, the administration said.

The seasonal bill for heating oil, which is common in New England, is estimated to be $2,694, up about 45% from last winter.

It’s due to Wuhan Flu and to the policies of Joe Biden and his Democratic Party comrades, who keep doing things that create problems, both before and after COVID. The U.S. really doesn’t get much from Russia, we have our own supplies.

Help with heating bills is available for low-income families. The Biden administration is distributing $4.5 billion for the federal Low Income Home-Energy Assistance Program, which provides grants to states to help residents pay their energy bills. But, Wolfe said, overall funding is lower than last year, under a pandemic relief program, and more federal money may be needed.

Well, that only helps folks making around $20K or less. What about the rest of us?

Consumers can take steps now to prepare for the winter and conserve energy. “It’s November; there’s still time to get ready,” Wolfe said. Heating contractors are typically less busy right now, he said, before temperatures plummet.

The most widely recommended step: Schedule a professional checkup of your heating system. A tuneup is advisable because dirty components reduce airflow, blunting performance and possibly damaging the system, according to ASHRAE, a professional association of heating and cooling professionals. A tuneup typically costs $200 or more, but some utilities cover the cost.

So, spend money to save a little

If your home has a lot of windows, particularly older ones, you may be losing energy through the glass. One easy fix, he said, is to stick clear plastic Bubble Wrap — the kind used to ship packages — over the windowpanes. (Spray the glass with water first so the wrap sticks.) It won’t look great, he conceded, but it will save you money.

Really? This is their idea? Bubble wrap? I feel like it’s the 1930s or something

You could consider replacing an old heating system with a more efficient model. The costs range from $4,000 to $7,000 for a gas furnace and from $5,500 to $40,000 or more for some heat pump systems, according to estimates provided by contractors in western and central New York state.

They seriously wrote $40,000. Is this with your $20K solar panels and $56K EV?

Meanwhile, here’s CNET on the perfect setting for your winter thermostat

According to the US Department of Energy, it’s best to keep your thermostat at 68 F for most of the day during the winter season. For maximum efficiency, you should also designate eight hours per day during which you turn the temperature down by between 7 and 10 degrees. By following this routine, you may again be able to reduce your yearly energy costs by up to 10%.

Who’s up for keeping your casa at 58-61?

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The Philadelphia Inquirer, which declines to print the photos of criminals who are black, sure is willing if the perp is white. That the perp is a former police officer is just icing on the cake for the Inky!

As we have previously noted, The Philadelphia Inquirer chose not to publish the photos of Quadir Jones, charged in the rape of a 13-year-old girl leaving a SEPTA train station on her way to school, or Yaaseen Bivins, already convicted and awaiting sentencing for an incident killing an unborn child, and now accused in the Roxborough High School shootings, but they made certain that we knew a former Warminster police officer who pleaded no contest to sexually assaulting five underaged boys was a white guy:

‘A wolf in sheep’s clothing’: For years, a Warminster police officer sexually assaulted troubled teens, DA says

James Carey assaulted four teenage boys he met through the D.A.R.E. program, prosecutors say.

Screen Capture from Philadelphia Inquirer, October 27, 2022. Click to enlarge.

by Vinny Vella | Thursday, October 27, 2022 | 12:26 PM EDT

A Warminster police officer acted as a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” and sexually assaulted four teenage boys he knew were dealing with difficulties at home, Bucks County District Attorney Matthew Weintraub said Wednesday.

More than 30 years after the initial alleged attacks, James Carey was arrested Wednesday and charged with felony sexual abuse.

“A police officer’s creed is to protect and serve his community,” Weintraub said. “In a perverse and cruel dereliction of duty, James Carey took advantage of the rank and credentials he had as a police officer on the job to prey on our community’s most vulnerable.”

Carey, 52, met his victims between 1988 and 2000, when he worked as an officer in the D.A.R.E antidrug program at schools in the Centennial School District in Warminster, Weintraub said. But he had access to victims beyond the schools, including on overnight camping trips to the Poconos and to Camp Ockanickon, a Boy Scout facility in Pipersville, the district attorney said.

With his conviction, Mr Carey faces a maximum of 94½ to 189 years in prison. 🙂 Whatever his sentence, I suspect that a convicted child rapist who is a former police officer will not much enjoy his time in prison.

Let me be clear about this: I have no objection to the Inquirer publishing photos of criminals. Indeed, I think that they should be published, and it is The First Street Journal’s policy to do just that. But that the Inky, which publisher Elizabeth ‘Lisa’ Hughes proclaimed to be an “anti-racist news organization,” one which would:

  • establish “a Community News Desk to address long-standing shortcomings in how our journalism portrays Philadelphia communities, which have often been stigmatized by coverage that over-emphasizes crime,”
  • create “an internal forum for journalists to seek guidance on potentially sensitive content and to ensure that antiracism is central to the journalism,” and
  • examine their “crime and criminal justice coverage with Free Press, a nonprofit focused on racial justice in media”

seems to have decided that the way to do that is to indicate for readers when crimes, especially crimes committed by police officers, are committed by white people.

Perhaps that’s what Miss Hughes thought would be the right thing to do after declaring that the Inquirer was a ‘white newspaper’ in a ‘black city.’

The Inquirer did not just publish the offender’s photograph after he was convicted, but did so on April 20, 2021, shortly after he was arrested, 1½ years before conviction, as I have documented in this screen capture, taken at 4:39 PM EDT on Thursday, October 27, 2022. Why the screen capture? It ought to be obvious: I do not trust the editors of the Inquirer not to scrub the earlier article once this is pointed out to them!

Want more proof? Published just this afternoon:

Samir Ahmad, taken during FBI sting operation, photo via Steve Keeley, Fox 29 News, on Twitter. Click to enlarge.

Guns used in Roxborough shooting later ended up in the hands of a Philadelphia sheriff’s deputy

Samir Ahmad, a four-year veteran of the department, was arrested while at work last week as part of an FBI gun trafficking investigation, court records say.

by Ellie Rushing and Jeremy Roebuck | Thursday, October 27, 2022 | 4:35 PM EDT

Two of the guns used in the shooting outside of Roxborough High School last month, which left a 14-year-old dead and four teens injured, later ended up in the hands of a Philadelphia sheriff’s deputy who then illegally resold the weapons to a federal informant, according to a court filing unsealed Thursday.

Samir Ahmad, 29, a four-year veteran of the department, was arrested at work last week as part of an FBI gun-trafficking investigation, the records say.

The photos of now-fired Deputy Sheriff Samir Ahmad were freely available, and on Twitter an hour before Miss Rushing’s and Mr Roebuck’s story was published. The Roxborough High School football field shooting has been a major story in the City of Brotherly Love, so this wasn’t just a minor gun trafficking story. But the Inquirer reporters and editors did not, for some reason, publish the photos alleging to show the now-former Deputy Sheriff in the act of selling guns, somehow lifted from evidence lockers, to what he thought was a criminal and an illegal immigrant, but turned out to be an FBI agent.

The credentialed media sure didn’t like being called #FakeNews, something which challenged their veracity and credibility, but they sure have been caught in the act doing it, kind of a lot. The credentialed media rarely tell outright lies, but they often omit important pieces of information when the whole truth would undermine their political positions.

Now, here the Inky goes again, trying to conceal the races of black law-breakers, not that readers wouldn’t have guessed just from the names of the accused that they were black, but making sure that readers would know when an accused man (at first) and now convicted sex offender and rapist is white.

The part I really don’t get? The editors, reporters, and publisher of the newspaper know that people like me are watching, yet they keep doing the same stuff, over and over and over again.