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AOC reveals the anti-Semitism of the Squadristi

What is the “Iron Dome“?

Iron Dome (Hebrew: כִּפַּת בַּרְזֶל‎, romanized: Kippat Barzel) is a mobile all-weather air defense system developed by Rafael Advanced Defense Systems and Israel Aerospace Industries. The system is designed to intercept and destroy short-range rockets and artillery shells fired from distances of 4 kilometres (2.5 mi) to 70 kilometres (43 mi) away and whose trajectory would take them to an Israeli populated area.

Iron Dome was declared operational and initially deployed on 27 March 2011 near Beersheba. On 7 April 2011, the system successfully intercepted a BM-21 Grad launched from Gaza for the first time. On 10 March 2012, The Jerusalem Post reported that the system shot down 90% of rockets launched from Gaza that would have landed in populated areas. In late 2012 Israel said that it hoped to increase the range of Iron Dome’s interceptions, from a maximum of 70 kilometres (43 mi) to 250 kilometres (160 mi) and make it more versatile so that it could intercept rockets coming from two directions simultaneously.

In November 2012, official statements indicated that it had intercepted over 400 rockets. By late October 2014, the Iron Dome systems had intercepted over 1,200 rockets.

In addition to their land-based deployment, it was reported in 2017 that Iron Dome batteries would in future be deployed at sea on Sa’ar 6-class corvettes, to protect off-shore gas platforms in conjunction with Israel’s Barak 8 missile system.

Simply put, the Kippat Barzel is a system which does not have an offensive capacity; it is entirely defensive. So, why would the Squadristi[1]The group of ‘progressives’ elected to the House of Representatives in 2018 called themselves the ‘Squad.’ Squadristi, or Squadrista in the singular form, is one of the … Continue reading be so opposed to the system?

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez apologizes after tearful ‘present’ vote on Israel Iron Dome funding bill

Adela Suliman | Saturday, September 25, 2021

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) penned a lengthy and emotional open letter apologizing to her constituents on Friday for effectively abstaining in a vote over funding for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system, which overwhelmingly passed in the House a day earlier.

Ocasio-Cortez, who could be seen weeping in the House after the vote, used her letter to criticize both the substance of the bill and what she described as the “reckless” and “rushed” process to pass it. She opposed the “unconditional aid to the Israeli government,” she added in her letter, but ultimately switched her vote from “no” to “present,” meaning a member takes no position in favor or against but records their presence.

The House voted for the measure 420 to 9.

However, Ocasio-Cortez’s decision to effectively abstain attracted ire from some liberal supporters.

“Normally I find AOC a person with moral values … This time though, as a few other times, I must say she should’ve stuck with other “Squad” members,” wrote one person on Twitter. Another said, “AOC primes people to believe she will never compromise, then does.” Meanwhile, an opinion piece accused her vote of being “a tactical mess” and a “worst-of-both-worlds solution,” and suggested that it indicated she could have higher political ambitions.

Describing her actions in her letter, Ocasio-Cortez wrote: “Yes, I wept. I wept at the complete lack of care for the human beings that are impacted by these decisions, I wept at an institution choosing a path of maximum volatility and minimum consideration for its own political convenience.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez glamour photo for her 2018 campaign.

There’s more at the original. You can also read it here, and avoid The Washington Post’s paywall.

How, I have to ask, was voting to support the system a “complete lack of care for the human beings that are impacted by these decisions”? The Kippat Barzel is designed to protect people, primarily innocent civilians, and, in this case, innocent Jewish civilians, from mortar, artillery and rocket fire launched by the Palestinian terrorists in Gaza, Judea, Samaria and Lebanon. What are we to conclude other than the lovely Miss Ocasio-Cortez wants the Palestinians to have a way to shoot rain death and destruction upon an innocent, civilian population?

Miss Ocasio-Cortez is the most infamous of the squadristi for one simple reason: she’s the only one who isn’t, to be blunt about it, ugly. They all share one characteristic: they’re all full-blown anti-Semites.[2]I first typed “raging anti-Semites,” but they make half-hearted attempts to hide it. Even with today’s #woke[3]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 credentialed media, looks matter, and pretty women matter most of all.

But anti-Semitism is ugly, bone-deep ugly, and that’s what the squadristi are. Miss Ocasio-Cortez’s pretty face can’t hide an ugly philosophy, an ugly soul. To be pro-Palestinian, as the squadristi are, is to be in favor of the destruction of Israel, and everybody knows it.

One could be opposed to providing offensive weaponry, that the Israelis could use to attack the Palestinians, and claim that they just want to save lives, but to be opposed to a shield to protect innocent Israeli citizens from being killed is to want innocent Israeli citizens to be killed, because killing innocent Israeli civilians is what Hamas and Hezbollah want to do.

Democratic tensions over Israel erupt again as House backs funds for Iron Dome system

By Donna Cassata | September 23, 2021 | 6:07 PM EDT

The House overwhelmingly approved $1 billion for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system Thursday after a blowup among Democrats as Rep. Rashida Tlaib (Mich.) called the Mideast ally an “apartheid state” guilty of war crimes and Rep. Ted Deutch (Fla.) accused her of antisemitism.

The debate again exposed the political and religious fault lines in the party caucus over Israel, pitting members of the so-called Squad, some of them Muslim, against Israel’s longtime Jewish supporters.

Tlaib, the first Palestinian American woman to serve in Congress, said Palestinians are living under a “violent apartheid system” in opposing the money for the Iron Dome program.

“I will not support an effort to enable and support war crimes, human rights abuses and violence,” she said, calling the Israeli government an “apartheid regime.”

Mr Deutch is right, of course: Mrs Tlaib is an anti-Semite, and favors a ‘one-state’ solution for the Middle East, which is to say that she wants the Palestinians and Israelis to share one nation, hoping that the high birthrate of the Palestinians will allow them to eventually outnumber and outvote the Jews. Of course, I supported a one-state solution as well, but I favored the Israelis expelling all of the Arabs from the land, pushing them into Jordan and Syria, and annexing all of the territory they control, but, alas!, the time for that was 1967 and 1968, right after the Six Day War, and it would no longer work.

The tensions among Democrats over Israel flared earlier this week when leaders included the funding for the Iron Dome in a stopgap spending bill to keep the government funded into the fiscal year that starts Oct. 1.

A handful of progressives threatened to vote against the bill, which would have sunk the spending package. House Democratic leaders pulled the missile defense funding and put it into the stand-alone bill passed Thursday.

Translation: the Democrats’ margin in the House is so small that the squadristi could have stopped the spending bill completely. What a shame that it wasn’t stopped!

Jewish Americans are the Democrats’ second most loyal voting demographic, but the non-Jewish Democrats pretty much hate their guts. Americans of Jewish descent need to realize that their real friends are conservatives, and stop voting for people who would gladly see the one Jewish nation in the world pushed into the sea.

References

References
↑1 The group of ‘progressives’ elected to the House of Representatives in 2018 called themselves the ‘Squad.’ Squadristi, or Squadrista in the singular form, is one of the Italian names given to Benito Mussolini’s Blackshirts, his paramilitary/thug force in fascist Italy. I think referring to the ‘Squad’ as Squadristi is completely appropriate.
↑2 I first typed “raging anti-Semites,” but they make half-hearted attempts to hide it.
↑3 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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Killadelphia

There are times I begin to feel like a broken record. I noted that the City of Brotherly Love was up to 393 homicides as of 11:59 PM on Wednesday, September 22nd. This morning, the Philadelphia Police Department reported that there have been 397 murders as of 11:59 PM EDT on Thursday, the 23rd. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported on three of the killings, but, as usual, I had to dig to find the article; it was not on the Inquirer’s website main page.

    Three men killed in separate Philly shootings in a one-hour span

    Two shootings happened in North Philadelphia and the third in Frankford.

    By Robert Moran | Thursday, September 23, 2021

    Three men were killed in separate shootings Thursday night in Philadelphia, police said.

    Shortly after 7:30 p.m. a 29-year-old man was sitting inside a silver Toyota Camry on the 3500 block of North 21st Street in North Philadelphia when he was shot twice, police said. The man, whose name was not released, was taken by medics to Temple University Hospital and pronounced dead at 8:07. Police reported no arrests.

    2800 block of North Orkney Street, from Google Maps. Click to enlarge.

    Just before 7:45 p.m., two men were outside on the 2800 block of North Orkney Street in North Philadelphia when they were shot. One of the victims, a 31-year-old whose name was withheld, was shot multiple times in the chest. Police took him to Temple, where he was pronounced dead at 8:09.

    The second victim, a 52-year-old man, was shot in the left leg and buttocks. Police took him to Temple, where he was listed in stable condition. Police reported no arrests.

    Around 8:30 p.m., an unidentified young man was outside on the 1300 block of Wakeling Street in Frankford when he was shot several times in the head. He was pronounced dead at the scene by medics. Police reported no arrests.

1300 block of Wakeling Street, from Google Maps. Click to enlarge.

Wakeling Street appears, at least on the Google Maps view, to be a reasonably nice neighborhood.

As usual, Mr Moran’s stories are off of the Inquirer’s website main page by the time the morning rolls around. The newspaper is great on decrying “gun violence,” but, as Inquirer columnist Helen Ubiñas noted last December, even her paper doesn’t really care:

    The last time we published the names of those lost to gun violence, in early July, nearly 200 people had been fatally shot in the city.

    Just weeks before the end of 2020, that number doubled. More than 400 people gunned down.

    By the time you read this, there will only be more.

    Even in a “normal” year, most of their stories would never be told.

    At best they’d be reduced to a handful of lines in a media alert:

    “A 21-year-old Black male was shot one time in the head. He was transported to Temple University Hospital and was pronounced at 8:12 p.m. The scene is being held, no weapon recovered and no arrest.”

    That’s it. An entire life ending in a paragraph that may never make the daily newspaper.

Actually, the paper would never say, “A 21-year-old Black male was shot one time in the head,” but just a 21-year-old male. To identify the victims as black or white or Hispanic would, over time, report what everybody already knows: in a city that’s only 38.3% non-Hispanic black, black victims, primarily black male victims, will make up the vast majority of homicide victims in the city. Given that publisher Elizabeth Hughes has vowed to make the paper “an anti-racist news organization,” well, they can’t have the paper, as the Sacramento Bee once put it, “perpetuating stereotypes about who commits crime in our community.”

As always, I run the numbers: 397 homicides ÷ 266 days elapsed in the year = 1.492 homicides per day, x 365 = 544.76 murders projected for the year.

We had previously reported that the homicide rate in Philly had slowed down, from mid-July through August, but it seems to have picked right back up again.

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Killadelphia Black lives don't matter to The Philadelphia Inquirer.

As we noted Monday, the homicide rate in foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia had picked up a bit. At the end of the weekend, 384 homicides had plagued the City of Brotherly Love, moving the death rate to 1.466 per day, for a projected 535 for the year.

Then the city recorded two more homicides on Monday, on one of which The Philadelphia Inquirer reported. I pointed out that the next ‘milestone’ will be 391 homicides, which is the full year’s total for 2007. The city will probably pass that next weekend. Continue reading →

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I’ve said it before: when it comes to murder, The Philadelphia Inquirer is much more concerned about cute little white girls

I have previously noted what I called the racism of The Philadelphia Inquirer, and have noted, many times, that unless a murder victim is someone already of note, or a cute little white girl,[1]When accessed in September 21, 2021, at 2:05 PM EDT, the search returned 4,548 results. 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 not news.

My point about the “cute little white girl” was in reference to Rian Thal, “a party promoter well-known in the city’s nightclub scene” and drug dealer, who was murdered on June 27, 2009. The city was captured by Miss Thal’s killing, and the local media were full of stories about it. The Inquirer and its sister publication, the Philadelphia Daily News, just loved splashing Miss Thal’s killing across their pages. After all, cute white girls sell newspapers!

But, as many times as I’ve used that, it was still twelve years ago, and since then, this year in fact, Inquirer publisher Elizabeth Hughes stated that her goal was to make the newspaper and its associated website “an anti-racist news organization.” So, wouldn’t the obvious result of that to be not concentrating on cute white girls as the victims of crimes?

Gabby Petito.

A site search for “Gabby Petito” returned 16 articles, the latest at 2:10 PM EDT today, just ten minutes before I made the search. Miss Petito is yet another cute little white girl, one whose disappearance has attracted a lot of social media, and credentialed media, interest.

Sixteen articles, though, to be fair, most were written by other than Inquirer reporters.

A photo taken during a block party last year of Dunkin’ Donuts manager Christine Lugo.

What about Christine Lugo? Miss Lugo was a 40-year-old Hispanic woman, the manager of a Dunkin’ Donuts on Lehigh Avenue in the city’s Fairhill neighborhood. The senseless murder was actually well covered by the city’s media, including the Inquirer, but a site search for “Christine Lugo” at 2:30 PM yielded only four returns, and two of them weren’t about her at all.

A cute little white girl, with no connection to Philadelphia, had sixteen mentions, while Philadelphia’s own Miss Lugo resulted in two.

Boy, it’s a good thing that Miss Hughes was determined to make the Inquirer “an anti-racist news organization,” or Miss Petito would have a hundred mentions, and Miss Lugo still two.

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain: Joy Reid is . . . right?

So, while my previous links to the Inquirer’s coverage of Miss Thal, as evidence of the newspaper’s racism, remain, her death twelve years ago, which I remembered from reading the print edition that I used to pick up before work, can be characterized as old news. But the disappearance, and probable death, of Miss Petito is today’s news, and it remains as evidence of what I have said all along: when it comes to their priorities and integrity, cute little white girls are still much, much more important to 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 journolists[3]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 of The Philadelphia Inquirer.

References

References
↑1 When accessed in September 21, 2021, at 2:05 PM EDT, the search returned 4,548 results.
↑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. than anyone else.

↑3 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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Journolism: The Philadelphia Inquirer tries to make a political argument for the city getting a WNBA team I might believe that the editors are concerned about women's sports if they actually covered women's sports

Philadelphia Youth Poetry Movement, 2011 Knight Arts Challenge Winners - Flickr - Knight Foundation (cropped)Today’s Philadelphia Inquirer held a ‘debate’ over the question, “Should Philly get a WNBA team?” Denice Frohman, a former professional, but not WNBA, player, and a “Philly-based award-winning poet, performer, and educator who has featured on national stages from The White House to The Apollo,” wrote in support of the idea.

    With the WNBA celebrating its 25th season and playoffs on the horizon, I’m reminded why Philly needs our own team in the most progressive league in major sports.

That isn’t a great start; she is already telling you that her interest is primarily in ‘progressive’ politics more than sports. Miss Frohman’s Wikipedia biography, from which her picture has been taken, doesn’t mention her basketball career at all, but says this about her:

    Denice Frohman is a poet, writer, performer and educator, whose work explores the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality. Frohman uses her experience as a queer woman from a multi-cultural (Puerto Rican and Jewish) background in her writing. By addressing identity, her work encourages communities to challenge the dominant social constructs and oppressive narratives in place that are currently working against concepts of unity and equity. Her message is about claiming the power to be who you are. She was born and raised in New York City, and earned her master’s degree in education from Drexel University.

Miss Frohman is all about the politics, and any basketball she played is simply incidental. After seven paragraphs, including the one quoted above, she gets into this:

    Beyond the metrics, when I think of what it would mean for Philly to have a WNBA team. I think about how players have championed social justice in a league comprised of nearly 70% Black women athletes, and how that would resonate in a city undeniably shaped by Black women’s leadership.

    I think about the night Philly voters helped turn Pennsylvania blue in the last presidential election, coinciding with Atlanta Dream players’ successful campaign to elect Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock—the first Black senator in Georgia’s history—ousting former Dream owner and incumbent Kelly Loeffler. I think about WNBA player Angel McCoughtry spearheading the idea for players to wear social justice messages on their uniforms last year (an idea the NBA borrowed).

    Philly needs no introduction to the national stage, but having a WNBA team can say something powerful about who we are and who we believe in. It can speak to the women and girls from Norris Square to Southwest about what is possible when you dream out loud.

Screen capture, Philadelphia Inquirer website sports section, September 21, 2021, 9:10 AM EDT.

I suppose that this is typical for the oh so #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 Philadelphia Inquirer, the notion that basketball is primarily a political thing. I am reminded of Pavel (Pasha) Pavlovich Antipov’s, Strelnikov’s, statement in Dr Zhivago, “The personal life is dead in Russia. History has killed it.” Perhaps the editors ought to ask the question of who would actually attend WNBA games?

Miss Frohman wants a WNBA team in Philadelphia for political reasons, in her case, left-wing political reasons. I doubt that many people reading the sports section of the Inquirer, which is where I found it, are going to find those reasons good ones for putting a WNBA team in the City of Brotherly Love.

Kerith Gabriel, “a former Daily News sports writer and currently a digital editor at the Inquirer“, was assigned the task of writing the opposing view, and in his first paragraph, he apologized for being a man writing it:

    I already knew writing as a cisgender man to say that a WNBA franchise won’t work may subject me to cancellation, or at least dismissal that I’m just some guy who doesn’t like women’s sports.

LOL! But, after his initial apology, Mr Gabriel does that most horrid, horrid! of things, he writes about the economics, the capitalist concerns of a Women’s National Basketball Association team.

    Let’s start with the numbers. According to an online survey conducted by national statistics firm Statista, interest in the WNBA is around 28% for men and just 18% for women. Further segmented, only 9% of men surveyed and just 4% of women considered themselves avid fans.

    The WNBA has always focused on appealing to a younger generation, attempting to capture the horde of young hoopers who could look at legendary basketball players like Sue Bird and Tamika Catchings as idols. It’s a smart strategy considering that the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) pipeline, in which young kids are trained for serious basketball (and other sports), is big business. Even in the Philadelphia area, there are well over 100+ AAU teams, many of them girls-only leagues.

    But again, according to 2021 numbers from Statista, the WNBA is the ninth most popular sport among Gen Zers. In terms of live games? The WNBA ranked 13th in a survey of American favorite sports Americans enjoy watching live before the pandemic. That means more young adults would rather watch cars go around an endless circle for two hours (NASCAR, 26%), than watch a women’s professional basketball game.

Heaven forfend! Mr Gabriel isn’t talking about the politics of having a WNBA franchise, but on how such a team would do something really radical like support itself. He concluded with:

If you look at the viewer guides for ESPN and the NBA Network, you’ll see that, even in the summer, even in the off-season for the NBA, those sports networks would rather show reruns of old NBA and other men’s sports games than live WNBA games. Those network executives aren’t doing so because they hate women’s sports, but because they believe they will earn more advertising revenue from those choices.

Me being very politically incorrect, I’ll note the women’s sports the sports networks do show: NCAA volleyball, beach volleyball, gymnastics and ice skating. Why? Because those are the province of pretty white women, while women’s basketball, as Miss Frohman noted concerning the WNBA, is nearly 70% black. Even The Philadelphia Inquirer, and the rest of the city’s media, do the same thing, as I have frequently noted in mentioning that the Inquirer only cares about murder victims when they are cute little white girls like Rian Thal.

You think I’m exaggerating? The Inquirer’s website lists 15 articles about the disappearance of Gabby Petito, a cute little white girl, but one with no connection to the city, yet only two about Christine Lugo, a 40-year-old Hispanic woman who was murdered in a widely-talked-about robbery in Philadelphia.

If the Inquirer editors are so concerned about women’s basketball, maybe they ought to increase their coverage of NCAA women’s basketball, in a city which boasts several collegiate basketball teams.

The media know their audience.

The Inquirer article was listed in the sports section of the newspaper’s website. As I noted previously, the Inquirer eliminated reader comments on articles, saying:

    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.

The one place they do still allow comments? In the sports section! But for this “Pro/Con” opinion piece in the sports section, reader comments were not allowed, because the editors knew that this was far more of a political debate than a sports question. This isn’t journalism, but journolism,[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 the embedding of a political argument in the sports section. Of course, that means a lot of Inquirer readers will never see it, because a lot don’t bother with the sports section.

Me? I don’t care one way or the other whether the WNBA puts a franchise in Philly. I don’t live there, so the chances I would ever attend a WNBA game in that city are virtually nil. I don’t attend NBA games, either; the only one I ever attended was on October 8, 1971, when the Kentucky Colonels of the old American basketball Association lured — with money — the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks, when Kareem Abdul-Jabbar played for them, to Louisville’s Freedom Hall for an exhibition game. I am far more likely to watch a college basketball game on television than a professional game. But the Inquirer’s ‘debate’ isn’t about basketball at all; it’s about liberal politics, and basketball was merely their platform.

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.
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The homicide rate ticks up a bit in Killadelphia

We had previously reported on the slowing down of the homicide rate in the City of Brotherly Love, but things may be going back in the wrong direction again. The Philadelphia Police Department reported 378 homicides as of 11:59 PM EDT on Thursday, September 16th, but their next report, for 11:59 PM EDT on Sunday, September 19th, showed 384 people killed.[1]The Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page states that the homicide “statistics reflect the accurate count during normal business hours, Monday through Friday”, so we … Continue reading That’s six people murdered in three days, and twelve people killed over the past week.

    Man killed and 5 others wounded in Fern Rock drive-by shooting

    The shooting happened near the intersection of Broad Street and West Chew Avenue.

    by Robert Moran, Chris Palmer, and Ellie Rushing | Monday, September 20, 2021 | Updated: 6:43 PM EDT

    A 26-year-old man was killed and five other adults were wounded in a drive-by shooting Monday afternoon in the city’s Fern Rock section, police said.

    The shooting happened just before 2:20 p.m. on the 1300 block of West Chew Avenue near Broad Street.

    Five victims were taken by private vehicle to Einstein Medical Center, police said. The man who was fatally wounded was transported by police to the hospital, which is just a few blocks away. He was pronounced dead at 2:55 p.m.

    The five surviving victims, including a 28-year-old woman, were listed in stable condition. No arrests were immediately reported.

There’s more at the original. The story noted that the six victims were just standing on the street when a silver Chrysler 300 pulled up, and someone in the back seat started shooting; a photo in the Inquirer shows the Philadelphia Police putting down evidence markers, normally where shell casings were found, showing evidence marker 19.

We reported, just two weeks ago, that over the last 1½ months, the murder rate has really dropped. There had been 314 homicides as of July 22nd, the 203rd day of the year. Since that time, 46 days ago, there have been ‘just’ 49 murders, a rate of 1.0652 per day. With 116 days left in 2021, if that rate were maintained, there would be ‘just’ 124 more killings, for a total of 487 for the year, 12 fewer than last year, and 13 fewer than 1990’s all time record of 500. If that number was the final one, it would be 75 fewer homicides than the math had projected just two months ago.

Now, the city has seen 12 homicides in 14 days, ticking the homicide rate up from 1.458 per day to 1.466, and a projected 535 for the year.

The next ‘milestone’ will be 391 homicides, which is the full year’s total for 2007. The city will probably pass that next weekend.
———————-
Update: Tuesday, September 21, 2021 @ 8:30 AM EDT

The Philadelphia Police Department reported 386 homicides as of 11:59 PM EDT yesterday.

References

References
↑1 The Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page states that the homicide “statistics reflect the accurate count during normal business hours, Monday through Friday”, so we don’t get the totals for Friday, Saturday and Sunday until Monday morning.
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A picture worth a thousand words. Why won't the credentialed media report the whole story?

I normally avoid photos that might be under copyright, but this one tells a tale that ought not to be avoided, and thus falls under ‘fair use’ standards. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

    SEPTA bus riders are frustrated by persistent delays. Officials say a shortage of drivers is to blame.

    The regional transit agency was not able to hire at the rate of attrition and has to play catch up.

    by Thomas Fitzgerald | Saturday, September 18, 2021

    SEPTA has a deficit of 105 bus operators, a lingering effect of the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to delays on many of the agency’s bus routes. Alejandro A Alvarez, Philadelphia Inquirer Staff Photographer. Click to enlarge. Photographer

    For weeks, SEPTA’s real-time online bus service status page has been speckled with red triangles warning riders of delays on many routes “due to an operator shortage.”

    The transit agency is down 105 bus operators, officials said. Austerity measures during last year’s coronavirus shutdowns, including a four-month hiring freeze, have hampered SEPTA’s ability to keep up with attrition.

    As a result, thousands of frustrated riders wait longer at bus stops.

    And when operators scheduled for duty call in sick or have family emergencies, regular occurrences in a workforce of more than 2,600 people, managers in SEPTA’s nine bus garages have to scramble.

There’s more at the original, but the telling part of the photo is the sign on the front of the bus: “A mask or face covering is required on SEPTA”. You can click on the photo to enlarge it, and see the bus marquee more easily.

We have previously reported on mask mandates for certain jobs, including bus drivers, pushing people away from those jobs. People just don’t want to wear a diaper over their faces. But the only reference to that in the Inquirer article was this:

    The transit agency is down 105 bus operators, officials said. Austerity measures during last year’s coronavirus shutdowns, including a four-month hiring free(Nat Lownes, of the Philly Transit Riders Union) said some of his friends who are bus operators tell him they’re worn out with the demands of the job, which include enforcing federal mask regulations and often dealing with irate riders. “It can be brutal,” he said.

The Inquirer article didn’t have a single word about bus drivers themselves not wanting to wear masks, and while some passengers don’t want to wear the silly things for a thirty-minute ride, the drivers are required to have them on for an eight hour, or longer, shift.

This is why I frequently refer to journolists. The spelling ‘journolist’ 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. There’s really no way that Thomas Fitzgerald, the article author, didn’t know about the frustration of bus drivers and others having to wear face masks for hours on end, and the stories of the patricians going maskless while their ‘servants’ had to wear face diapers aren’t going to encourage people to take jobs requiring the wearing of masks.

An actual journalist would have reported on that, but the editorial position of the Inquirer is to support mask and vaccine mandates, and the credentialed media just don’t like reporting on things with which they disagree.

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The Catholic Church and the Right to Privacy

We have twice reported on Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill, who resigned as General Secretary of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, after a conservative Catholic site used cell phone data to show him using Grindr, a homosexual dating app, and frequenting homosexual bars, and noted the New York Times story “Catholic Officials on Edge After Reports of Priests Using Grindr“. Naturally, the Church can’t say that it’s acceptable for priests to be using homosexual pick up apps, but the Church is very concerned about the privacy rights of priests, at least when it comes to their COVID vaccination status.

The Most Reverend John Stowe, Bishop of Lexington

Which brings me to the Most Reverend John Stowe, O.F.M.Conv., the Bishop of Lexington. We have reported, many times, on the Bishop’s policies, with a rather jaundiced eye.

While I have heard no statements from Bishop Stowe concerning Pillar’s exposure of Msgr Burrill’s activities, it would seem that the Bishop is pretty much unconcerned with the privacy of priests in his diocese.

    Bishop Stowe: Catholics deserve to know if their priest is unvaccinated

    Michael J. O’Loughlin | September 16, 2021

    Bishop John Stowe, O.F.M.Conv., last month asked that diocesan employees working at the Catholic Center in the Diocese of Lexington, Ky., vaccinate themselves against Covid-19, extending a mandate that had already been announced for faculty and staff at Catholic schools. The bishop said the diocese let go of “a handful” of employees who refused. When it came to priests in the diocese, the bishop said he turned to “moral persuasion,” urging them to vaccinate themselves as a way to protect parishioners. That seemed to work. About 92 percent of the diocese’s 50 priests have been vaccinated, a rate that puts them as a group well ahead of the 61 percent of adults in Kentucky who are fully vaccinated.

The math is pretty simple: 92% of 50 priests is 46 priests, meaning four diocesan priests are unvaccinated. The Bishop publicly exposed two of them, Father John Moriarty, the Rector of the Cathedral of Christ the King parish, and Father David Wheeler, a parochial vicar at the Cathedral parish, as not having been vaccinated. The Cathedral parish is where the diocesan Bishop has his seat, so His Excellency the Bishop was unable to persuade two other priests that he sees, almost every day, at his resident parish, to get vaccinated.

The other two unvaccinated priests of his diocese have not been named.

I note that the report states that the Bishop “let go”, a euphemism for fired, “a handful” of employees who refused to be vaccinated, meaning that he took “a handful,” whatever that number happens to be, and threw them into poverty. While The Lord hears the cry of the poor, he might not expect one of his Bishops to add to the number of the poor.

    But for the few priests who chose not to be vaccinated, the bishop believes they owe it to their parishioners to be upfront about their status.

    “When I found out that four of them still were not vaccinated, I said they had to disclose that to their people because people were expecting they would be vaccinated,” Bishop Stowe told America. He said he also told the unvaccinated priests that “they couldn’t go into the homes of the sick or the homebound or be in close proximity” to worshippers.

Odd thing, though, that the Bishop would fire let go the “handful” of diocesan employees who declined to be vaccinated, but did not fire let go the four diocesan priests who refused. Could that be because lay employees are far easier to find in this economy, but priests are in short supply? With more parishes, 59, than priests, several priests, including my own parish pastor, who will turn 88 years old in a couple of weeks, have to serve more than one parish.

We have previously noted that Bishop Stowe has been very supportive of homosexual rights and recognition of ‘transgender’ individuals as the sex they claim to be, rather than the sex they are, but I cannot accurately report his position on Pillar’s exposure of the homosexual activity of Msgr Burrill and the privacy rights of Catholic priests when it comes to their vows of celibacy. But we certainly know his views on the privacy rights of both his parish priests and lay employees when it comes to their vaccination status.

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Will Bunch wants to cut out large swaths of America

I remember when columnists had a 750-word limit, but with the coming of the internet, Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch, who is so far to the left that he makes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez look, if not sane, at least less wacky, got in 1,345, in which he tells us that he has no flaming idea about his topic. Nevertheless, I’d have expected him to understand something about politics!

A broken America should build a monument to Joe Manchin’s massive ego

The self-centered, greedy West Virginia senator is a poster child for everything wrong with U.S. politics. So what is the Joe Manchin workaround?

by Will Bunch | Columnist | Thursday, September 16, 2021

As the summer of 2021 comes to an ignominious end this week, millions of Americans will remember these blazing hot months as a time of dashed hopes on ending our life-altering pandemic and growing alarm about the floods and fires fueled by climate change. But in Washington, D.C. — the place where solving these problems needs to start in the U.S. — both the hellish season and what it might mean for future generations will be recalled as “Almost Heaven,” the well-equipped houseboat owned by West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin where the nation’s leaders spent a moonshine-soaked summer lazily floating past the crises. .  .  .  .

Will Bunch, from his Philadelphia Inquirer author photo.

So, who is Will Bunch? His first-person Inquirer biography states, “I’m the national columnist — with some strong opinions about what’s happening in America around social injustice, income inequality and the government.” I’ll admit it: whenever I see #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 phrases like “social justice” and “income inequality”, I know I’m dealing with someone who has no flaming idea about real life. People are different, and different people means different outcomes for people. Sadly, the Inquirer staff are eaten up by wokeness.

Mr Bunch also supports the Palestinians and their terrorist groups, which also tells us a lot.

Mr Bunch’s Twitter header photo shows him walking away from a dilapidated Appalachian (?) home, but it seems that he has little understanding of the people who live in Appalachia.

But with autumn closing in, Washington seems hopelessly adrift on Biden’s ambitious plans for working families and fighting climate change, and any forward progress will likely depend on what comes out of Manchin’s bandaged brain in the coming weeks. In a slew of TV appearances, the West Virginian has made it clear he will use his deciding vote in the 50-50 Senate to shrink Biden’s plan from $350 billion a year to only $100 billion to $150 billion — he’s failed to truly articulate why — and he’s also managed to downsize the ambitions of a do-or-die-for-democracy voting-rights bill, even as he insists (for now) he won’t end the filibuster to pass even that. Whatever happened on that houseboat, the brief chance to end American kleptocracy may be sinking.

Indeed, analyzing Manchin and his motives — both politically and psychologically — has become something of a cottage industry in the nation’s capital. I’ve already written about how Manchin’s pro-billionaire austerity politics are wildly out of step with the real-world needs of voters in poverty-plagued West Virginia, suffering from pothole-laced highways, climate-worsened floods, and opioid abuse. Instead, the senator and former governor sees promoting his personal brand as his path to winning elections and wielding power.

And here we have exactly what I would have expected from a big-city liberal, the self-assured knowledge that he knows what’s best for rural dwellers in a different state.

In the 2020 election, President Trump carried West Virginia, beating Joe Biden 545,382 (68.62%) to 235,984 (29.69%), Mr Trump’s second strongest state, percentagewise. In only one county, Monongalia, did President Trump get less than 50% of the vote, 49.45%, which still beat Mr Biden’s 48.21% there. Mr Trump got over 80% of the vote in nine separate counties.

This is the part Mr Bunch just doesn’t get: Senator Manchin, the only statewide elected Democrat in office, is doing what his constituents in the Mountain State want him to do. He is acting like the moderate Democrat he campaigned as being.

Mr Bunch has a long section, which I have not quoted, in which he tells us what a self-centered, greedy political hack Mr Manchin is, before telling us what he thinks is needed.

After 2022, the only way for the United States to get where it wants to go is not through Joe Manchin and his tired political hackery, but around him. West Virginia may be a very Trumped-up place right now, but voters here in Pennsylvania, as well as Ohio, Wisconsin, and other key states, will get a shot next fall to build a Senate majority that is actually controlled by Democrats and not the Chamber of Commerce. Metaphorically speaking, we need an infrastructure bill with a 10-lane superhighway of American progress, that bypasses West Virginia altogether.

It doesn’t seem to occur to Mr Bunch that perhaps, just perhaps, not all Americans agree with him as to where the United States “wants to go”. You’d think that he ought to have a clue, given that, while Mr Biden carried Pennsylvania by 81,660 votes, it was because he carried Philadelphia by 471,050; President Trump carried the rest of the Commonwealth by 390,445 votes. Perhaps, just perhaps, with 378 homicides in just 259 days of the year, for an average of 1.46 per day, on track for 532 for the year, Philly isn’t exactly the model of modern life that the rest of the country would see as great.

Ahhh, but, then again, perhaps he does realize that, given that he wants to “(bypass) West Virginia altogether.” He’d probably throw Tennessee, Mississippi, and Kentucky in that same category as well.

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.