Category Archives: Lies damned lies and statistics

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#COVID19: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself!”

My very good electronic friend, William Teach, from whom I stole borrowed the image to the right, noted on Thursday that the Usual Suspects and Fearmongers are once again calling for masking up!

Experts Start To Push Masking Again

By William Teach | Thursday, August 31, 2023 | 7:00 AM EDT

They can piss right off

Should we wear masks again? Covid guidelines experts recommend

The uptick of Covid transmissions this summer has raised questions about whether or not certain safety measures such as wearing masks should be brought back.

Several companies and schools nationwide decided to reinstate Covid mask mandates in light of the rising hospitalisations including Morris Brown College in Atlanta, Lionsgate headquarters in Los Angeles, Kaiser Permanente across all California locations, and several hospitals in the state of New York. Workers and attendees at these locations are now required to wear masks upon entry.

“It is ticking up a little bit, but it’s not something that we need to raise any alarm bells over,” Dr David Dowdy, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told the Seattle Times. Although many health experts like Dr Dowdy don’t believe people have cause to worry, some have expressed their concerns.

While many people have forgone wearing masks, UC San Francisco infectious diseases expert, Dr Peter Chin-Hong, cautioned the Los Angeles Times that swearing off masks for good would put people at higher risk of contracting the virus, elaborating: “Right now, when things are heating up all around the country with Covid, you might want to think about [masking at] public transit and airports.”

No. Just no. People aren’t buying this stuff anymore. Well, most aren’t, there’s always a few. We all know masks do not work. Study after study shows this. If the Powers That Be try this again, most will refuse.

There’s more at the original.

We noted, also on Thursday, the hypocrisy of The Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz whining that everyone should wear masks, to protect others, while she attends Hollywood tea parties maskless, with other unmasked people.

Listen to the propaganda, and you’d believe that COVID Doom is headed for us again! But what happens when you look at the actual numbers?

Philadelphia sees slight rise in COVID hospitalizations

Case counts in 2023 remain well below COVID-19 rates this time last year.

by Sarah Gantz | Thursday, August 31, 2023 | 11:45 AM EDT

The Philadelphia Department of Public Health is urging people to take precautions against COVID-19 as hospitals see a slight rise in cases.

A total of 60 people are currently hospitalized with COVID in Philadelphia, marking the first time since the spring that more than 50 people have been hospitalized with the virus, according to the health department. Case counts remain “far below” illness and hospitalization rates this time three years ago, the department said in a news release.

In Pennsylvania, weekly COVID hospital admissions rose from 281 cases on Aug. 5 to 403 cases on Aug. 19, the most recent week for which data are available through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There were 1,453 weekly COVID hospital admissions reported in the same week of August last year, according to the CDC.

There’s more at the original.

President Biden was among the Fearmongers before the winter of 2021-22, when he said:

We are looking at a winter of severe illness and death for the unvaccinated – for themselves, their families and the hospitals they’ll soon overwhelm. But there’s good news: If you’re vaccinated and you have your booster shot, you’re protected from severe illness and death.

Well, we didn’t have that “winter of severe illness and death” in 2021-22, or in the winter of 2022-23. And now, as The Philadelphia Inquirer reported, at least in Pennsylvania, despite a small uptick, hospital admissions due to COVID-19 are not just down, but way down, from the same period last year.

Naturally, the Inky didn’t do the math, but I will: 403 cases in 2023 ÷ 1,453 cases the same week last year = 0.27735719201651754989676531314522, or 27.74%. COVID cases serious enough to require hospitalization are just 27.74% of what they were last year!

Glenn Greenwald wasn’t talking about the virus when he made the statement:

Fear is crucial for state authority. When the population is filled with it, they will acquiesce to virtually any power the government seeks to acquire in the name of keeping them safe. But when fear is lacking, citizens will crave liberty more than control, and that is when they question official claims and actions. When that starts to happen, when the public feels too secure, institutions of authority will reflexively find new ways to ensure they stay engulfed by fear and thus quiescent.

but it applies anyway. The government are pushing fear, when there is no indication that there is anything reasonable to fear. Yes, COVID-19 cases have ticked up, but they’ve done so very slightly, and are still at much lower levels than they were even as the country was getting back to normal from the panicdemic.

More math: if “In Pennsylvania, weekly COVID hospital admissions rose from 281 cases on Aug. 5 to 403 cases on Aug. 19,” we have to ask: how many people live in Pennsylvania? According to the Census Bureau’s July 1, 2022 population guesstimate, there were 12,972,008 living in the Keystone State. 403 ÷ 12,972,008 = 3.1066894192479683947157602739684e-5. That means that 0.003107%, three people out of every 100,000, of the state’s population were sick enough with COVID-19 to be hospitalized, and most of those hospitalized will survive.

Feel free to check my math, because I already have!

President Franklin Roosevelt, in his inaugural address in 1933, in the depths of the Depression, said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself!” Well, fear is what so many on the left, what so many in the government, is trying to instill in all of us. We must resist that fear, we must resist those attempts, not only because they are unreasoning, but because they are a means by which the government is trying to control the people.

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Whenever there is a truth you cannot tell, that is a truth you must tell!

We have previously noted that the Most Rev Salvatore Cordileone has stated that the Archdiocese of San Francisco would probably have to declare Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Well, the time has come. From The New York Times:

Archdiocese of San Francisco Becomes the Latest to File for Bankruptcy

About a dozen dioceses and archdioceses in the United States are currently in bankruptcy proceedings as a result of multiple lawsuits alleging sexual abuse of children.

by Ruth Graham | Monday, August 21, 2023

Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone, photo from Archdiocese of San Francisco.

The Archdiocese of San Francisco, known for its outspoken conservative leadership, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization, Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone announced on Monday. The filing is intended to protect the archdiocese from what Archbishop Cordileone described as more than 500 civil lawsuits filed against it under a state law passed in 2019 that extended the statute of limitations for civil claims in child sexual abuse cases.

“We believe the bankruptcy process is the best way to provide a compassionate and equitable solution for survivors of abuse while ensuring that we continue the vital ministries to the faithful and to the communities that rely on our services and charity,” Archbishop Cordileone said in a letter addressed to Catholics in San Francisco.

Archbishop Cordileone signaled the bankruptcy earlier this month, warning publicly that the filing was “very likely.”

The article author, Ruth Graham, “is a Dallas-based national correspondent covering religion, faith and values for The New York Times. She graduated from Wheaton College and previously worked as a writer and reporter at Slate.” Telling us that she used to write for Slate is telling us that she’s a liberal, but what else would you expect from the Times? While she was very good at telling readers that several other diocese and archdiocese have been forced to file for bankruptcy over the cover ups of sexual abuse claims, she managed to write 547 words, and never mention what everybody already knows, that this is a crisis of having homosexual priests. Continue reading →

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Killadelphia: How many extra have died? The statistics require a lot of assumptions, but I see an entire 'extra year' of killings in Philly due to the left

It was on May 25th that I noted the somewhat unusual statistical trend, and ask the headline question, Could Philly see ‘only’ 450 homicides in 2023?

In 2020, the City of Brotherly Love had 499 ‘official’ homicides, though, as we have noted, several times, the change in the Philadelphia Police Department’s statistics, down from the 502 homicides initially reported for 2020, down to 499, one short of the then-all-time record of 500, set during the crack cocaine wars of 1990, under the ‘leadership’ of then-Mayor Wilson Goode, he of MOVE bombing fame. I made a totally rookie mistake, and failed to get a screen capture of that, but a Twitter fellow styling himself NDJinPhilly was apparently smarter than me that particular time, took the screen shot, and then tweeted it to me.

The trend of the numbers was such that it looked as though the total homicide numbers would be higher than 2022’s 516, but also lower than 499. As of Wednesday, July 26th, the total homicide numbers year to date have dropped below the level in 2020.

How do the numbers work out? Wednesday was the 207th day of the year, meaning that, if the 242 homicides number is correct, Philly has been seeing ‘only’ 1.169 murders per day, an average which works out to 426.71 for the year. However, the first half of the year contains more colder months than the latter half, and homicides normally increase with warmer weather. In 2022, which saw 516 killings, 59.88% of the year’s murders were committed by July 26th. At that rate, we would expect a total of 404.14 killings for all of 2023, a number which is close enough to 399 to leave the city with fewer than 400 murders.

May 25, 2020, saw the unfortunate death of the methamphetamine-and-fentanyl addled convicted felon George Floyd while he was resisting arrest for passing counterfeit money in Minneapolis. With that, the American left went absolutely bonkers, and killings soared. May 24, 2020 had seen 147 murders in Philly, 1.021 per day, on a path toward 373.625 for the year, a bit above the 356 homicides for the previous year, but not monstrously so.

My conclusion is simple: the lawless reaction of Antifa and the idiotic #BlackLivesMatter protesters led to the killings of an additional 125 people in Philadelphia in 2020!

There are some assumptions that I have to take here, assumptions which may not play out. But if I plot out a graph from 374 ‘should have been’ homicides in 2020, to a ‘projected’ 427 for this year, assume that rise to have been steady, there should have been 391 murders in 2021, 409 in 2022, and the projected 427 for this year. That means that the left-wing riots led to 125 more murders in 2020, 171 in 2021, and 107 in 2022. Yeah, there are entirely too many assumptions that I’ve had to take, but I’m seeing 403 more people murdered, in Philadelphia alone, due to the lawlessness of attitude spawned by the riots, and most of those murder victims have been black males.

Yes, this is way too simplistic a calculation. The inaction of District Attorney Larry Krasner when it comes to locking up criminals before they are graduated to murder, as well as the strongly pro-abortion status of the city’s politicians have a lot to do with it, but there has been a cheapening of life, a callousness in the city, a callousness which doesn’t see killing other people as all that bad a thing. Yes, I see an entire ‘extra year’ of killing in Philly due to Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and #woke progressives.

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Killadelphia: Lies, damned lies, and statistics The Editorial Board of The Philadelphia Inquirer gets the numbers wrong; are they trying to mislead readers?

We have previously noted that many of the credentialed media 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 have complained about Steve Keeley of Fox 29 News and his unsoftened coverage of crime in the city. Now, what I have previously referred to as The Philadelphia Enquirer[2]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. are combitching again, but they have been lying in their complaints.

In a main editorial supposedly written by the Inquirer’s Editorial Board, but reads like something composed by hard-left columnist Will Bunch, the newspaper complained:

Of course, no place is perfect. The record gun violence in Philadelphia is beyond distressing. But mainly Republican state and federal lawmakers — many of whom represent suburban districts — share responsibility for enabling and glorifying gun culture.

That, of course, is not what “mainly Republican state and federal lawmakers” did. Rather, they recognized that gun control laws do not and have not stopped criminals from obtaining firearms, and removed some impediments on law-abiding citizens from purchasing weapons. As we have previously reported, Philadelphians themselves have been seeking concealed carry permits in unprecedented numbers because of the chaos in the city.

Local TV news shares some blame as well for disproportionately covering gun crimes in the city. That negative narrative shapes the views of many who act as if bullets are flying everywhere in Philadelphia when nearly all of the more than 1.5 million residents manage to go about their routines each day.

Really? Let’s check that! The hyperlink embedded in the newspaper’s own editorial does not say what the Editorial Board claimed!

Kaufman and her fellow researchers drew on police reports and information kept by the Gun Violence Archive, a non-profit research group, to monitor media reporting during 2017 in three different cities: Philadelphia, Cincinnati, and Rochester, NY. Of the 1,801 victims of intentional shootings (outside of self-inflicted shootings), the researchers saw that almost exactly half, 900, were covered in the news.

Of these victims, roughly 83 percent were Black, but just 49 percent of them made the news. Moreover, if the victim was a man, he was about 40 percent less likely to be covered on the news than a woman.

How many times have we reported that for The Philadelphia Inquirer, unless a shooting or murder victim is an ‘innocent,’ someone already of note, or a cute little white girl, the editors of the Inquirer don’t care, because, to be bluntly honest about it, the murder of a young black man in Philadelphia is simply not news. We have often noted that The Philadelphia Inquirer, the nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, doesn’t like to tell its readers the unvarnished truth, likes to censor what its readers see. The Inquirer only rarely reports on homicides in the City of Brotherly Love. The paper paid more attention to the accidental killing of Jason Kutt, a white teenager shot at Nockamixon State Park, an hour outside of the city. That’s four separate stories; how many do the mostly black victims get?

The Editorial Board are complaining about disproportionate coverage, when that is exactly what their newspaper has given us!

Disparities in news coverage continued when the deadliness of the shootings was examined. Although 16 percent of the victims from the analyzed shootings died, these fatal shootings accounted for 83 percent of the cases covered by the news.

So, both the cited research and the Editorial Board are complaining that non-fatal shootings get less news coverage than fatal ones? Is that somehow a surprise? As Mark Fusetti just pointed out, the City of Brotherly Love passed the 1,000 mark for fatal and non-fatal shootings this year. On how many has the Inky reported?

“A vast majority of the victims of gun violence survive, but I don’t think the public knows much about people whose lives have been disrupted in so many ways by their injuries, and who need all our support to recover,” Kaufman said. “I like to think that more public awareness of the impact of gun violence on survivors would lead to broader support for the services and programs that they need.”

The Inquirer actually has reported on shooting victims who have survived, but I cannot recall such a story on a surviving gang-banger; the newspaper seems to tell us only about the innocent victims of shootings. Then again, as we have previously reported, the newspaper tried to make an innocent victim out of a homicide victim who was clearly not so innocent a victim.

And, of course, we have noted the apparent editorial decision to stop using the word “gang”, and replace it with “street group”

Statistics have shown that one in four Americans perceive mass shootings to be the greatest gun violence threat facing their communities, but the study showed that shootings with multiple victims occurred just 22 percent of the time. However, mass shootings were almost six times as likely to make the news.

Could that be because the Inquirer itself plays up the ‘mass shootings,’ especially when the victims are not black, and downplays the killings of black ‘street group’ members?

But here comes the biggest lie of all:

In fact, rural counties have a higher rate of gun deaths than cities — contrary to country singer Jason Aldean’s recent paean to small town life. Not to mention, most mass shootings occur in small towns, studies show, while a separate report found Center City, at least, remained “remarkably safe.”

We previously reported that in 2020, there were 1,009 murders in the Keystone State, 499, or 49.45%, of which occurred in Philadelphia. According to the 2020 Census, Pennsylvania’s population was 13,002,700 while Philadelphia’s alone was 1,603,797, just 12.33% of Pennsylvania’s totals.

It got worse in 2021: with 562 homicides in Philly, out of 1027 total for Pennsylvania, 54.72% of all homicides in the Keystone State occurred in Philadelphia. Allegheny County, where Pittsburgh is located, was second, with 123 killings, 11.98% of the state’s total, but only 9.52% of Pennsylvania’s population.

The other 65 counties, with 78.11% of the state’s total population, had 33.30% of total murders. It should also be noted that in comparing 2018 with 2021, the homicide rate for the 65 counties which are not Philadelphia and Allegheny (where Pittsburgh is), barely increased, from 3.38 per 100,000 population, to 3.42, a 1.12% rise, in Philadelphia it jumped from 22.31 to 35.53 per 100,000 population, a 59.21% increase.

Things got slightly better in the City of Brotherly Love in 2022, with 516 homicides officially reported in the Philadelphia, out of 1,015 total homicides for the Commonwealth. That’s still 50.84% of the killings in the Commonwealth!

The Census Bureau’s July 1, 2022 population estimates for Pennsylvania, and Philadelphia specifically, were 12,972,008 and 1,567,258 respectively, meaning that Philly had just 12.08% of the state’s population. The homicide rate for the rest of the Keystone State was 4.38 per 100,000 population, while for Philly it works out to 32.92 per 100,000, 7½ times the rest of the Commonwealth.

Strip out the 138 homicides in Allegheny County, where Pittsburgh is located, and the 65 other counties in the Commonwealth had 361 homicides for 10,171,497 people, for a murder rate of 3.55 per 100,000.

The same source lists 418 murders and non-negligent homicides so far in 2023; the Philadelphia Police Department reported that, as of 11:59 PM EDT on Sunday, July 23rd, 239 of those murders occurred in Philadelphia. That’s 57.18% of the total, in a city with 12.08% of the Commonwealth’s population, and that’s in a year in which homicides are down!

How did the Editorial Board’s citation get it so wrong?

The findings are based on an analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The authors attributed the trend to a rise in gun suicides, which outnumbered gun homicides in 2021 by more than 5,300 and are more likely to occur in rural counties.

The Editorial Board conflated suicides with murders. News flash: people haven’t been arming themselves in tremendous numbers to protect themselves from suicides!

I do not claim to be a super-genius like Wile E Coyote, but am pretty good with numbers. Being good with numbers, it’s pretty easy for me to spot bovine feces when people misuse statistics and references as citations, as I did in this article. Who knows? Perhaps the Editorial Board simply assume that they are smarter than their readers, or believe that readers won’t check their source citations. Well, perhaps most won’t, but out of all of the newspaper’s subscribers, surely they ought to guess that a few people will.

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 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.
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Lies, damned lies, and statistics The left use bogus numbers to try to make their case

Garbage in, garbage out: when you base your arguments on lies bad data, your arguments fall apart.

Mary Lou Marzian, former Kentucky House Representative for the previous District 34, and Honi Marleen Goldman, described as “a Kentucky activist,” and is, in fact, a pro-abortion agitator, were granted OpEd space in what my best friend used to call the Lexington Herald-Liberal, claiming that the General Assembly, Kentucky’s state legislature, is unfairly gerrymandered to harm the interests of the Commonwealth’s urban residents.

Fueled by dark money, Kentucky’s rural/urban divide hurts all of us | Opinion

by Mary Lou Marzian and Honi Goldman | Thursday, May 25, 2023 | 10:11 AM EDT | Updated: 12:23 PM EDT

Kentucky is comprised of 120 counties. In only two of those counties is there a major city, Louisville and Lexington (1.4 million and 517,000 respectively). Together these two key cities make up 44% of Kentucky’s population.

The citizens of Louisville and Lexington are diverse in race, religion, and ethnic origin. The population in Kentucky’s smaller towns and counties is primarily white and Christian.

The biggest concerns in the urban centers are crime, homelessness, and human rights. The rural areas focus on gun rights, “Family Values” and government overreach.

The issues for both sides are unique and fundamental to their respective populations.

Read more here.

One of the things about reading articles online is that the browser tabs can sometimes tell you more than the authors and editors want you to know. As originally saved, the article was entited “With misinformation, Ky’s urban/rural divide hurts us.” Someone, who would normally be the newspaper’s editor, changed the title, to blame “dark money”, and changed urban/rural to rural/urban. 🙂

The authors’ first paragraph gives us the “misinformation” with which the article was originally entitled. Louisville’s population is not 1.4 million and Lexington’s is not 517,000. According to the United States Census Bureau, the Louisville/Jefferson County’s population in the 2020 Census was 633,045, and the July 1, 2022 guesstimate is 624,444. The Census Bureau stated that Lexington/Fayette County’s population was 322,570 in the 2020 Census, and a guesstimated 320,347 as of July 1, 2022. The population of the entire state was given as 4,505,836 in the Census, and an estimated 4,512,310 last July.

Let’s do the math! 624,444 + 320,347 = 944,791. 944,791 ÷ 4,512,310 = 0.2094, or 20.94%.

So, no, those “two key cities” do not “make up 44% of Kentucky’s population.”

It has been suggested that Misses Marzian and Goldman were actually using the metropolitan statistical area concept for population numbers, and the Louisville metropolitan statistical area had a population of 1,395,855, close enough to the 1.4 million the authors claimed.

Also see: William Teach; Credentialed Media Is Losing Minds After Target Removes LGBT Material

But the metropolitan statistical area for Louisville includes Clark, Floyd, Harrison, and Washington counties in Indiana! Unintentionally or otherwise, Misses Marzian and Goldman were trying to include parts of Indiana in the Bluegrass State’s population, to reach their elevated count of 44%.

The Kentucky counties listed as part of the Louisville metropolitan statistical area are, along with Jefferson, Bullitt, Henry, Oldham, Shelby, Spencer, and Trimble. The authors contended that these were all urbanized counties, with urbanized interests: “crime, homelessness, and human rights.” But, in the 2020 presidential election, while Joe Biden carried Jefferson County 228,358 (59.06%) to 150,646 (38.96%) for President Trump, Mr Trump carried the other listed Kentucky counties, in the same order, by 73.12%, 72.05%, 59.65%, 63.93%, 76.42%, and 74.70%.

The counties listed as part of the Lexington/Fayette County metropolitan statistical area are Bourbon, Clark, Jessamine, Scott, and Woodford, and while Mr Biden carried Fayette County 90,600 (59.25%) to Mr Trump’s 58,860 (38.49%), President Trump carried the other listed counties, respectively, 64.16%, 65.11%, 65.05%, 61.33%, and 54.97%.

In the two United States Senate races, Mitch McConnell vs Amy McGrath Henderson in 2020, and Rand Paul vs Charles Booker in 2022, while the Democrat challenger carried Jefferson and Fayette counties, the Republican incumbent carried all of the others in their metropolitan statistical areas.

These are all statewide races; there are no gerrymandered districts.

Back to the original:

However, 75% of Kentucky State House Representatives, 77% State Senators, 83% of U.S. House Representatives and 100% of Kentucky’s U.S. Senators are making laws that affect nearly half of Kentucky’s population who are against what these legislators are voting for and what their campaigns are based on.

The authors couldn’t even get that right! The GOP controls 80%, not 75%, of the seats in the state House of Representatives; the 75% figure was from the previous House, from 2021-22, rather than the current one. With 30 seats in the state Senate, the GOP controls 79% — 78.94% to be more accurate — in that chamber. Can’t the authors do math?

But, while those numbers are pretty strong for Republicans, with the only two reliably Democratic counties in the state having just 20.94% of the Commonwealth’s population, they seem to fit the way Kentuckians vote!

Naturally, there are some Republicans in Jefferson and Fayette counties, just as there are Democrats in the rural areas, but the numbers have pretty much worked out.

While the authors gave at least a tip of the hat to more rural Kentuckians — “The rural areas focus on gun rights, ‘Family Values’ and government overreach. The issues for both sides are unique and fundamental to their respective populations” — it didn’t take them too long to list a litany of complaints blatantly tilted to the ‘progressive’ agenda. They continued:

The citizens of Kentucky are fighting for their very existence. Laws are being passed that claim to “protect” the rural population from concocted horrors, are in fact hurting and killing people in the urban population.

Killing people? What laws are being passed which kill people? We know, of course, that Miss Goldman fully supports prenatal infanticide, so it would seem that the laws she supports would actually kill people!

In very conservative Kentucky, the Lexington Herald-Leader has apparently taken a full-tilt transgender advocacy stand. Long-time Herald-Leader columnist Linda Blackford even told us it was coming:

Alex Acquisto has written a harrowing, intimate account of some of the families in our state who are simply trying to meet their children’s needs in the wake of Senate Bill 150, which bans gender-affirming healthcare. She opens with a scene of 13-year-old Henry Svec who sat in a Frankfort hearing room as “experts” defined him as unnatural, confused and disordered. Henry and his parents are actually pretty clear about who Henry is and what he needs. They’d like to provide it to him, but the GOP majority has decided that “parents rights” means politicians get to decide what’s best for Henry.

In Opinion, we will have some first person accounts from trans people on the front lines. Rebecca Blankenship, the first trans person elected to public office in Kentucky, and some of her colleagues talk about how the trans movement is used by both the left and right for their own purposes. Ysa Leon, the incoming SGA president at Transy, always believed they would live in Kentucky and work to make it a better place, but now believes they will have to leave[1]The author claims to be transgender and uses the plural pronouns. because politicians are ginning up so much hatred. Bill Adkins, a lawyer in Williamsburg, is not trans, but he does study history and explains how political scapegoating of minorities can lead to far more deadly consequences. Former Rep. Mary Lou Marzian explains how gerrymandering has given rural legislators too much power over urban areas, which further heightens these kinds of divides.

As we have previously noted, the newspaper has fallen completely out-of-touch with its readership. Newspapers are failing all over the country, but the newspaper, which was once the dominant paper in central and eastern Kentucky, is a shadow of its former self. Where, in junior high and early high school I used to deliver the old Lexington Herald and afternoon Lexington Leader in Mt Sterling, they closed up their printing plant in seven years ago, outsourcing the print edition to a plant outside of Louisville 1½ hours west of Lexington, and dropped a separate Saturday edition at the beginning of 2020.

You want home delivery outside of Lexington? Too bad, so sad, but it ain’t going to happen!

The truthful statistic? Kentuckians as a whole are pretty conservative, and while there are some liberals and even progressives in the Bluegrass State, they are a decided minority. I can remember, back in the dark age of quill pens on parchment, University of Kentucky political science professor Malcolm Jewell telling his students that the two major party candidates are practically guaranteed 40% of the vote, and the real battle is for the 20% that’s actually up for grabs. But in the three most recent statewide general election campaigns, Democrats Joe Biden, Amy McGrath Henderson, and Charles Booker couldn’t even get the 40% Dr Jewell told us they were guaranteed.

References

References
↑1 The author claims to be transgender and uses the plural pronouns.
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Killadelphia: Lies, damned lies, and statistics

Sometimes, reporters for The Philadelphia Inquirer don’t really pay attention to their sources. Dylan Purcell wrote:

Through midnight Friday there were 155 homicides citywide, a 14% decline from the same date last year.

Well, that’s what the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page said on Saturday, but, as the website states, the figures are only updated Monday through Friday during normal business hours. The 155 figure is actually from Thursday, May 18th, but Mr Purcell was apparently unaware of that. Since Mr Purcell describes himself as “a local investigative reporter specializing in data and documents that expose wrongdoing”, one would think that he’d understand his data sources better.

And I note that the template still states that the percentage change is compared to 2021, but it’s actually the change compared to 2022.

Multiple weekend shootings in Philly leave four dead, and a 17-year-old in critical condition

A 21-year-old man was killed in the triple shooting in which two teenagers were wounded

by Dylan Purcell | Saturday, May 20, 2023

Multiple shootings Friday night and early Saturday in Philadelphia left four people dead and five others hospitalized, including a 17-year-old who was in critical condition, police said.

A 21-year-old man died after suffering multiple gunshot wounds in a triple shooting on the 5600 block of Baltimore Avenue in West Philadelphia about 8:45 p.m. Friday, according to police. The victim was identified as Michael Goodwin, of the 1200 block of South Greylock Street.

The two other victims — a 17-year-old who is in “extremely critical condition” and a 16-year-old reported in stable condition, were taken to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center.

Of course, Mr Purcell deleted what was actually reported, that a 21-year-old black man died, because reporting all of the news is against the Inquirer’s editorial guidelines.

Less than an hour earlier, a shooting inside a barbershop in the 2000 block of Kensington Avenue took the life of a 43-year-old man. The victim, Adinson Suarez-Marte, of the 3000 block of Hartville Street, was taken by police to Temple University Hospital for several gunshot wounds to his torso. He was pronounced shortly after arrival.

Police are seeking information on as many as eight men who they said were seen wearing dark clothing and masks. No arrests were made, or weapons recovered from the barbershop scene.

As many as eight men being sought? In other words, a gang shooting, not that the Inky uses the word “gang” anymore.

Mr Purcell also noted an apparent murder/suicide that was found shortly after midnight, which would place it under Saturday’s statistics.

The website Broad + Liberty maintains its own homicide tracker, because, quite frankly, a lot of people do not believe that the city’s statistics are completely reliable, and that site documents 160 homicides through Thursday, May 18th. B+L has a third homicide listed for the 19th, beyond the two the Inquirer reported, and does not, as of 12:40 PM EDT on Sunday, May 21st, include the reported murder/suicide.

Broad + Liberty is very careful in its collection of statistics, and includes links to its documentation of homicides; while a few of the reports are listed as media reports, the vast majority are from Philadelphia Police Department news releases or emails. This is a source Mr Purcell needs to consider, but if the Inquirer has ever questioned the PPD statistics, I’ve yet to see it.

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Killadelphia: Another three bite the dust!

We’ve known for a while now that District Attorney Larry Krasner (D-Philadelphia) does not like charging juveniles with adult crimes. Really, he doesn’t like charging adults with adult crimes. Nevertheless, he hasn’t completely ruled out charging the worst of Philly’s teens as adults:

The changes do not apply to juveniles who are repeat offenders or who are charged with serious crimes including gun possession, aggravated assault resulting in serious injury, sexual assault, and other felonies involving weapons.

Now comes a big test of Mr Krasner’s resolve:

2 teens arrested in quadruple shooting that killed 3 teens in Philly

“Just a travesty,” said Veronica J. Joyner, founder and chief administrative officer of Mathematics, Civics and Sciences Charter School of Philadelphia Inc., attended by two of the shooting victims.

by Diane Mastrull | Saturday, April 29, 2023 | 3:35 PM EDT

Two teenagers have been arrested in connection with a quadruple shooting that left three teens dead and one hospitalized Friday afternoon in Philadelphia’s Crescentville section, police said.

Police identified the dead Saturday as Malik Ballard, 17, of the city’s Frankford section; Khalif Frezghi, 18, of East Mount Airy; and Salah Fleming, 14, of North Philadelphia.

The shooting occurred about 3:30 p.m. Friday on the 5900 block of Palmetto Street, where, police said, Ballard was found shot on the sidewalk, Frezghi on a front porch, and Fleming just inside the front doorway of a home. All were pronounced dead at the scene by medics.

A fourth victim, a 16-year-old male who has not been identified, arrived at Jefferson Frankford Hospital with a gunshot wound to the stomach, police said.

Following that are several paragraphs telling us what good guys the victims were, we get this:

A short time after the shootings, police said Friday night, they found a black Ford Edge believed to have been involved in the shootings. It had crashed on the 500 block of East Wyoming Street. Police took two juveniles into custody and said they believed they had dropped off the injured 16-year-old at the hospital.

Police identified them only as 15- and 16-year-old males and said they have been charged with violation of the Uniform Firearms Act and related offenses.

Huh? If reporter Diane Mastrull’s story is accurate, we are expected to believe that the alleged killers then rescued one of their intended victims, and took him to the hospital. Does this make sense to anyone? My first impression is that the surviving victim was actually shot by one of the three dead boys, possibly in a gun battle, and the killers scooped the victims’ weapons before fleeing. Other scenarios could be constructed, such as the killers accidentally wounded one of their own.

There is, of course, the possibility that the police got the situation wrong.

A 15-year-old can be charged as an adult in the Keystone State for certain violent crimes

5900 block of Palmetto Street, image from Google Maps. Click to enlarge.

The 5900 block of Palmetto Street is a rowhouse neighborhood, not the worst in Philly, built around 1925, and looking as though there was a mid-1980s remodeling project oing on down the entire, short street. 5915 Palmetto Street, a 3 bedroom, 1 bathroom, 1,064 ft² rowhouse which looks like a recent flip, is currently for sale for $225,000, following a $20,000 price reduction on April 24th, which suggests that it’s been on the market for awhile with little interest, while 5946 Palmetto Street, same statistics, and also looking like a flip, is listed for $185,000.

Amusingly enough, all of the homes zillow.com lists for sale in the neighborhood show as having natural gas heat via hot water or steam radiators, so if Helen Gym Flaherty wins the Democratic nomination for Mayor, she’ll want all the residents in that poor, though not totally devastated, neighborhood to convert to electric heat pumps! 🙂

This is the last day of April, and the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page tells us that, through April 29th, there were 124, 169, and 154 murders on that date in 2020, 2021, and 2022, respectively. Those years finished with 499, 562, and 516 homicides, though that 499 number for 2020 is suspect, at least. Currently, with at least 137 homicides as of Friday, April 28th, the City of Brotherly Love is doing better than 2021 and 2022, but is ahead of the 2020 homicide rate.

The important date is May 25th, the date in 2020 in which the methamphetamine-and-fentanyl-addled previously convicted felon George Floyd died while resisting arrest in Minneapolis. That led to a whole summer of riots civil unrest in the #BlackLivesMatter protests. If the current year is ahead of 2020’s pace, the real numbers will tell us something if the pace stays ahead of 2020 post May 25th.

The homicide rate in Philly has been very much up-and-down in recent years, and I’m hesitant to start making projections based on current statistics. With the daily rate being higher than 2020, I could say that the city is on a path to more than 500 again, but being significantly below 2022, perhaps not. But one thing seems certain: teenagers in Philly are continuing to carry firearms, illegally, and show little restraint in using them.

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The credentialed media don’t understand their home state! Once again, the Lexington Herald-Leader is out of touch with Kentuckians

We have previously reported how the Lexington Herald-Leader, a McClatchy newspaper, follows the McClatchy Mugshot Policy, and refrains from publishing the photos of black suspects and convicted criminals, and does not refer to race in its criminal reports, though somehow, photos of accused criminals who are white manage to make it into the newspaper.

So, imagine my surprise when reporters Taylor Six and Aaron Mudd wrote this line:

Connor Sturgeon, a white male who police said was live-streaming the shooting, was a former employee at Old National Bank, the site of Monday morning’s shooting.

Naturally, I took the screen shot of the sentence, before it vanishes into the ether.

Authorities identify former Old National Bank employee as Louisville shooter

by Taylor Six and Aaron Mudd | Monday, April 10, 2023 | 4:10 PM EDT | Updated: 9:52 PM EDT

Louisville Metro Police have identified a 25-year-old man as the shooter who killed five people and injured several others before he was fatally shot by police at a downtown bank Monday morning.

Connor Sturgeon, a white male who police said was live-streaming the shooting, was a former employee at Old National Bank, the site of Monday morning’s shooting.

The new details emerged during a Monday afternoon press conference attended by city officials and Gov. Andy Beshear, who said he’d lost a close friend in the shooting.

According to police, officers were dispatched to Old National Bank Monday morning for reports of an active shooter. When they arrived, the shooting was ongoing, but the shooter was reported dead soon after.

Louisville Metro Police Department Chief Jacquelyn Gwinn-Villaroel named him Monday afternoon during a press conference. She said Sturgeon was formerly an employee with Old National Bank and assumed he was a Louisville resident.

According to the police chief, Sturgeon was killed by police gunfire. He was reported to have used a “rifle,” although police did not specifically state what type.

There’s a little more at the original, but nothing that hasn’t been all over the news. The story mentions that the killer was a “former” employee of the bank, but does not state what several other sources have, that he was discharged by the bank.

Naturally, the Herald-Leader’s primary columnist wants gun control:

After Louisville shooting, it’s time to get out our bullhorns. We’re sick of gun deaths. | Opinion

by Linda Blackford | Monday, April 10, 2023 | 12:28 PM EDT

Have we had enough yet?

Exactly two weeks after a deranged shooter killed six people in Nashville, three of them precious, innocent children, a deranged shooter killed four people in Louisville (the shooter also died), and sent eight more to the hospital.

Also see: William Teach, “Gun Grabbers Push Gun Grabbing Immediately After Leftist Nutjob Kills People“

There have been 131 mass shootings — defined as more than four people dead or injured — THIS YEAR alone, according to the Gun Violence Archive. Almost 10,000 people have died from guns since Jan. 1.

Today made 132. The archive updated its numbers as police gave their final reports.

A tsunami of “thoughts and prayers” from politicians will now roll down, hoping to drown us in distraction from the fact that they could stop this if they wanted to.

If we made them.

After several more paragraphs blaming “the guns,” Mrs Blackford comes up with a statement she has made before, and one she knows is a lie:

But once again, gerrymandered political districts do not represent the will of the people, who are sick of seeing people, children, die for nothing but a perverted misunderstanding of our founding fathers.

“Gerrymandered”? In 2020, Republicans dramatically increased their number of seats in the Kentucky General Assembly, from 61-39 in the state House of Representatives to 75-25, and in the state Senate from 28-10 to 30-8. But those gains happened under the district lines passed following the 2010 Census, when Democrats controlled the state House, and a Democrat was Governor. Republicans did not take over control of teh state House until after the 2016 elections; they did previously control the state Senate, including prior to the reapportionment.

Republicans did increase their seats in the 2022 election, up to 80-20 in the House and 31-7 in the Senate. Interestingly enough, the Democrats never even fielded candidates in 44 of the House districts, so there was no way they could even think about regaining control. In my own district, no serious Democrat ran in the primary, and a perennial kook candidate won the nomination, a candidate so bad that the state Democratic Party disavowed him.

Is there gerrymandering? In 2020, President Trump received 1,326,646 votes from Kentuckians, 62.09% of the total, while Joe Biden got only 772,474, or 36.15%. President Teump carried 118 out of the Commonwealth’s 120 counties, losing only Jefferson (Louisville) and Fayette (Lexington). In the same election, Senator Mitch McConnell won 1,233,315 votes, 57.76%, while his well-funded Democrat opponent, Amy McGrath Henderson received only 816,257, 38.23%. Mrs Henderson carried only three counties, Jefferson, Fayette, and Franklin, which included the state capitol of Frankfort.

In 2022, Senator Rand Paul, a libertarian Republican, won 913,326 votes, 61.80%, to Democrat Charles Booker’s 564,311 votes, 38.19%.

Those were statewide elections, which means there was no gerrymandering possible. Mrs Blackford might argue gerrymandering at the margins of the 2022 General Assembly races, but a difference of two or three would hardly matter against the GOP’s overwhelming majorities.

Mrs Blackford called the Commonwealth’s gun laws “a perverted misunderstanding of our founding fathers,” but that completely ignores history. When what became the Second Amendment was written, it was by the generation which had just won a revolution against Great Britain. In 1775, the military Governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Gage, had ordered gun control himself, ordering the confiscation of firearms and ammunition from the wretched colonials. It was to seize reported storehouses of gunpowder and ammunition that General Gage sent the redcoats to Lexington and Concord, resulting in the shot heard ’round the world, and the first battles in our revolution. Does Mrs Blackford seriously believe that the revolutionaries who began that war fighting against gun control by the British would not have meant for individuals to have the right to keep and bear arms.

In 1791, when the Second Amendment was ratified, many Americans lived on or very near the frontier. Does Mrs Blackford believe that the “founding fathers” would have thought the government could ban individuals from owning firearms when they had to hunt for game to put meat on the table, and be able to defend themselves from the Indian tribes? Does Mrs Blackford believe that when her home state of Kentucky was settled by white families, that the “founding fathers” would have believed it acceptable for the government to have the authority to ban individual ownership of firearms when the settlers needed to hunt for food and defend themselves from the Cherokee and Shawnee Indians who already lived here?

There were no telephones in the late 18th century, and homesteads could be pretty far apart. There were no police departments on the frontier. The first organized, publicly-funded professional full-time police forces in the United States were established in Boston in 1838, New York in 1844, and Philadelphia in 1854. If a bad guy was raiding a homestead, would the “founding fathers” have thought that the government could ban the private ownership of firearms by individuals, leaving them unable to defend themselves?

Mrs Blackford’s biography says that she “writes columns and commentary for the Herald-Leader. She has covered K-12, higher education and other topics for the past 20 years at the Herald-Leader.” Twenty years, huh? That means entirely in the 21st century, on computers and word processors, exercising her freedom of speech and of the press via giant printing presses and an internet which allows distribution of her words widely across the Herald-Leader’s service area, which is central and eastern Kentucky, and even around the world if someone chooses to search. These are certainly things of which the “founding fathers’ had no concept! If we were to accept the columnist’s ideas that the “founding fathers” certainly never meant for the Second Amendment to cover what it covers today, then wouldn’t we also have to say that the First Amendment does not cover more than a megaphone or a hand-set newspaper printed entirely by manual labor?

We have previously documented the newspaper’s endorsement history, and how the voters of the sixth congressional district and the commonwealth as a whole almost always vote the opposite from how what my best friend used to call the Herald-Liberal want.

When I moved away from the Bluegrass State at the end of 1984, the Herald-Leader was a broadsheet publication, and if not the size of Louisville’s Courier-Journal or The Philadelphia Inquirer, still a reasonable newspaper for central and eastern Kentucky. I used to deliver the old morning Lexington Herald and afternoon Lexington Leader in Mt Sterling, and when I returned to the Bluegrass State in 2017, I could see just how far downhill the newspaper had gone. Just a few pages, no longer a broadsheet, and visibly on its last legs. That, too, is freedom of speech and of the press, as, presented with the other news alternatives of television and radio and the internet, the people of the newspaper’s service area have chosen against it.

Perhaps that is why Mrs Blackford personally, and the newspaper’s editors in general, have lost touch with what used to be their service area. They now reflect only the opinions of the state’s second-largest city, and while it’s a significant voting block, it isn’t the majority of even the sixth congressional district. Mrs Blackford may blame it all on gerrymandering, but it’s the newspaper and her which are out of touch with Kentuckians, not the state legislature.
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Also posted on American Free News Network. Check out American Free News Network for more well written and well reasoned conservative commentary.

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Killadelphia: Lies, damned lies, and statistics

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

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

Death Investigation:

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

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

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

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