As we have previously noted, telling the people most at risk for contracting Monkeypox how to avoid it is just way, way, way too politically incorrect! Monkeypox, an infection that is being spread primarily, though not exclusively, by male homosexual sex, certainly worries the homosexual male community, but our public health officials are apparently very, very worried about not saying the wrong thing, lest they be deemed politically incorrect or, horrors! homophobic.

As Monkeypox Spreads, U.S. Declares a Health Emergency

The designation will free up emergency funds and lift some bureaucratic hurdles, but many experts fear containment may no longer be possible.

By Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Apoorva Mandavilli | Thursday, August 4, 2022

WASHINGTON — The Biden administration on Thursday declared the growing monkeypox outbreak a national health emergency, a rare designation signaling that the virus now represents a significant risk to Americans and setting in motion new measures aimed at containing the threat.

The declaration by Xavier Becerra, President Biden’s health secretary, marks just the fifth such national emergency since 2001, and comes as the country remains in a state of emergency over the coronavirus pandemic. The World Health Organization declared a global health emergency over the outbreak late last month.

Mr. Becerra’s announcement, at an afternoon news briefing where he was joined by a raft of other top health officials, gives federal agencies power to quickly direct money toward developing and evaluating vaccines and drugs, to gain access to emergency funding and to hire additional workers to help manage the outbreak, which began in May.

“We’re prepared to take our response to the next level in addressing this virus,” Mr. Becerra said, adding that “we urge every American to take monkeypox seriously, and to take responsibility to help us tackle this virus.”

Mr. Biden has faced intense pressure from public health experts and activists to move more aggressively to combat monkeypox, which has infected more than 6,600 people in the United States. Lawrence O. Gostin, a health law expert at Georgetown University, called Thursday’s declaration “a pivotal turning point in the monkeypox response, after a lackluster start.”

Let’s see: 6,600 cases, out of a population of roughly 330,000,000, means that a whopping 0.002% of Americans have been infected by a disease which, while very uncomfortable, has led to exactly zero fatalities in the United States.

More than 99 percent of people infected with monkeypox in this country are men who have sex with men, which has posed a delicate task for public health officials communicating with the public about the threat. They do not want to stigmatize gay people, as happened in the early days of the H.I.V./AIDS epidemic, but neither do they want to downplay their particular risk.

Translation: political correctness is far more important than disease prevention!

And now the CDC have released their guidelines, Safer Sex, Social Gatherings, and Monkeypox

While CDC works to contain the current monkeypox outbreak and learn more about the virus, this information can help you make informed choices when you are in situations or places where monkeypox could be spread. Monkeypox is not considered a sexually transmitted disease, but it is often transmitted through close, sustained physical contact, which can include sexual contact.

How can a person lower their risk during sex?

OK, stop right there! “A person” is singular, while “their” is plural. Why wouldn’t the officious bureaucrat who wrote this, knowing that monkeypox is spread not just primarily, but almost exclusively, by homosexual male sex, not use “His” rather than the grammatically incorrect “their”?

Vaccination is an important tool in preventing the spread of monkeypox. But given the current limited supply of vaccine, consider temporarily changing some behaviors that may increase your risk of being exposed. These temporary changes will help slow the spread of monkeypox until vaccine supply is adequate.

Reducing or avoiding behaviors that increase risk of monkeypox exposure is also important when you are between your first and second shots of vaccine. Your protection will be highest two weeks after your second dose of vaccine.

Make a habit of exchanging contact information with any new partner to allow for sexual health follow-up, if needed.

Talk with your partner about any monkeypox symptoms and be aware of any new or unexplained rash or lesion on either of your bodies, including the mouth, genitals (penis, testicles, vulva, or vagina), or anus (butthole). If you or your partner has or recently had monkeypox symptoms, or you have a new or unexplained rash anywhere on your body, do not have sex and see a healthcare provider. In some cases, symptoms may be mild, and some people may not even know they have monkeypox.

I noted that while the illustration in the CDC’s document shows two men males in bed, there is not one word in the document which says or suggests that sexual transmission of monkeypox is almost exclusively among male homosexuals.

If you or a partner has monkeypox or think you may have monkeypox, the best way to protect yourself and others is to avoid sex of any kind (oral, anal, vaginal) and kissing or touching each other’s bodies—while you are sick. Especially avoid touching any rash. Do not share things like towels, fetish gear, sex toys, and toothbrushes.

Even if you feel well, here are some ways to reduce your chances of being exposed to monkeypox if you are sexually active:

• Take a temporary break from activities that increase exposure to monkeypox until you are two weeks after your second dose. This will greatly reduce your risk.
• Limit your number of sex partners to reduce your likelihood of exposure.
• Spaces like back rooms, saunas, sex clubs, or private and public sex parties, where intimate, often anonymous sexual contact with multiple partners occurs—are more likely to spread monkeypox.
• Condoms (latex or polyurethane) may protect your anus (butthole), mouth, penis, or vagina from exposure to monkeypox. However, condoms alone may not prevent all exposures to monkeypox since the rash can occur on other parts of the body.
• Gloves (latex, polyurethane, or nitrile) might also reduce the possibility of exposure if inserting fingers or hands into the vagina or the anus. The gloves must cover all exposed skin and be removed carefully to avoid touching the outer surface.
• Avoid kissing or exchanging spit since monkeypox can spread this way.
• Masturbate together at a distance without touching each other and without touching any rash.
• Have virtual sex with no in-person contact.
• Consider having sex with your clothes on or covering areas where rash is present, reducing as much skin-to-skin contact as possible. Leather or latex gear also provides a barrier to skin-to-skin contact; just be sure to change or clean clothes/gear between partners and after use.
• Be aware that monkeypox can also spread through respiratory secretions with close, face-to-face contact.
• Remember to wash your hands, fetish gear, sex toys, and any fabrics (bedding, towels, clothes) after having sex. Learn more about infection control.

There’s more at the original, but it’s all the same thing: it is written with the underlying assumption that the stereotype of homosexual males being extremely promiscuous is accurate. The document doesn’t say that directly, of course, but it’s basically a wink-and-a-nod, yeah, we know what you reprobates have been doing.

One thing that is never suggested is something really radical like, oh, monogamy.

We have previously noted how the Central Bucks School District approved what The Philadelphia Inquirer called a “contentious” policy of not purchasing books with “sexualized content”. But the Inquirer’s Assistant Opinion Editor, Alison McCook, says that she wants her daughter to be able to read those books; does the Inky not pay her enough to buy them herself?

Why I want my kid to read banned books

Every school district — including Central Bucks — has LGBTQ students. Hiding books with positive LGBTQ messages won’t stop them from being gay, it will just stop them from feeling OK about it.

by Alison McCook | Monday, August 1, 2022

A few months ago, a long-awaited moment in my life arrived: My 8-year-old grudgingly let me read to her from my favorite childhood book, Harriet the Spy. As I opened my original copy, now faded, yellowed, and torn, and started reading about this judgy tomboy who is determined to be a writer, I had excited butterflies in my belly. But they stopped a few pages in, when Harriet’s nanny, Ole Golly, introduces Harriet to Ole Golly’s mother, who is obese. For several pages, Harriet keeps calling back to Mrs. Golly’s physique, describing her as a “mountain,” bursting out of her clothes, with “ham hands.” She has some sort of mental disability, perhaps dementia. “This fat lady wasn’t very bright,” Harriet thinks.

When I finished the chapter, I closed the book and reminded my daughter about how people come in all sizes and that it’s not nice to make a big deal out of the way someone looks. And I talked about her grandfather, my dad, who had dementia for her entire life — he had a problem with his brain, I said, which wasn’t his fault.

We have these conversations about older books a lot. The girl in The Secret Garden was born in India and is downright cruel to the local people who work for her family, calling them “pigs.” Stuart Little is kind of a sexist jerk. The Baby-sitters Club series has modern moments, but the books shouldn’t always call Claudia a “terrible student” when she struggles with math and reading, but clearly seems destined for a brilliant career in art or fashion. And as the only Asian character, she is consistently described in an exotic way, with “beautiful dark almond-shaped eyes” and “jet black hair.”

I didn’t ban any of these books; they’re still sitting on my kid’s bookshelf. But I would rather she read them with me so that we can talk about the many harsh asides they contain.

Perhaps Mrs McCook doesn’t realize it yet, but what she has just described is homeschooling her daughter, at least in part — and quite possibly a far greater part than most parents do — concerning the lessons she wishes her daughter to learn.

Not all children’s books should take place in some politically correct utopia where difference is celebrated and everyone is gentle and kind. There’s a reason schools teach Lord of the Flies and The Merchant of Venice, even though cruelty runs rampant through both. It’s important for kids to learn that life isn’t a PC utopia, and develop tools to think about and deal with that.

One wonders: would Mrs McCook approve of Tom Sawyer and, Heaven forfend! it uses that bad, bad word, Huckleberry Finn?

That said, I also believe it makes sense to revisit some of the books we consider classics and ask ourselves if the moments they depict are truly teachable, or just plain cruel. If the latter, perhaps they should be part of a classroom, not the library, so teachers can talk to kids about what they read and help them place it in a modern context.

Oh, so ‘Mark Twain’s’ classics should be revisited, though I’m having some trouble picturing today’s teachers having a classroom discussion of Samuel Clemens’ casual use of the “N” word. More, Mr Clemens writes the speech of black characters in a slave patois that modern readers would find offensive.

But we seem incapable of having rational conversations about books in school, mostly because of fear. On one side of the conversation, adults who want kids to have access to books with diverse authors and topics are afraid of being called “groomers” who seek to “turn” all kids gay or trans; on the other side, we have adults who are afraid of exposing kids to ugly parts of history or different kinds of people in a compassionate way. But these conversations are important, especially so since Central Bucks adopted a new ban on books with “sexualized content,” and Pennsylvania has the second-highest number of book bans of any state (after Texas).

So let me start. I believe we should revisit some older books that may make some kids feel hurt or unwelcome in the world. (That’s revisit, not ban.) But the books I suggest we revisit are not the books that will likely be banned by Central Bucks and other school districts across the state, which are targeting books that include LGBTQ characters, or address race or racism. I want my daughter to read the often-banned books The Bluest Eye and Gender Queer: A Memoir, even if she isn’t LGBTQ herself — I want to open her mind and heart to people who are different from her.

Here Mrs McCook shows us her agenda. With this paragraph, and with her entire column Why I take my kid to Philly Pride, the author tells us that she wants to normalize homosexuality and ‘transgenderism,’ to teach her daughter to accept those things as not being marginal, but something that ought to simply be expected. And that is precisely why some conservatives have called these things “grooming.” Some of us do not believe that those things are normal or acceptable, and that teaching that they are has harmed society. Given that the City of Brotherly Love has been setting new homicide records, but seems to see Monkeypox as a greater problem and the left want to change the name so it won’t hurt people’s feelings pretty much reinforced the idea that #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 politics is the real problem.

It is with some amusement that I also note that she wants to get rid of Mothers’ Day, which I read completely, just to see if she was writing with tongue firmly planted in her cheek:

You know who else probably hates this holiday? The roughly 20% of adult women who never have children. Some childless women likely tried to have children and couldn’t; think how sad the day is for them, as storekeepers and strangers tell them, unbidden, “Happy Mother’s Day.” Think about the women whose children have died, or have experienced miscarriage (roughly 20% of all pregnancies), or gave up a baby for adoption.

Then there are people who have mothers but don’t get along, and are happier when they don’t spend time together. A 2015 study found that more than 1 in 10 mothers are estranged from at least one of their adult children. What a painful reminder this day is for them.

So let’s cancel Mother’s Day.

In other words, Mrs McCook would cancel Mothers’ Day because it might hurt the feelings of those adult women who, for whatever reasons, might not be, nor ever be birthing people mothers. Interestingly enough, she also argued for the reimposed indoor mask mandates that the city quickly canceled when public resistance mounted.

One of my favorite days of the year is Philly Pride, and I take my kid whenever I can. This year, the kids’ area included a book section with author signings, and she begged me to buy her a book called When Aidan Became a Brother, about a trans boy, and how he and his family learn from his experience when welcoming a new sibling. “You taught us how important it is to love someone for exactly who they are,” Aidan’s mother tells him.

My daughter loves this book, and so do I. It’s a beautiful story about family, acceptance, and a kid who is just trying to be himself. I hope that reading about Aidan helps give my daughter the courage to be herself, to know that she deserves to feel loved and accepted no matter what.

And I hope she always remembers the inscription the author Kyle Lukoff (who is also trans) included for her when we asked him to sign her copy. “Thank you for being part of this world,” he wrote.

Mrs McCook is absolutely free to teach her daughter anything she wants; that is her right, protected under the Constitution via the First Amendment.

But what she also wants is for the public schools to teach other people’s children that homosexuality, ‘transgenderism,’ abortion, and heck, probably all of the woke mindset are good things, never realizing — or, if realizing, being perfectly willing to subvert — that other people might not want their children taught that such things are good, noble or acceptable.

Mrs McCook is very able to buy the books she wants her daughter to read all and learn by herself; she has a decent job, and books are cheap. Other people have the right to buy their kids the books they want them to read, whether Huckleberry Finn, The Communist Manifesto, or even the dreaded Mein Kampf.^[2]I’ve read all three, which ought to tell you exactly nothing about my political philosophy. I will confess that Mein Kampf is a dreadfully dreary reading, at least in English, because, written … Continue reading

I wonder if Mrs McCook would consider Mein Kampf acceptable in the school library?

The Bureau of Economic Analysis is scheduled to release the first guesstimate of real gross domestic product for the second quarter on Thursday, July 28^th; the second guesstimate is scheduled for Thursday, August 25^th, and the third for Thursday, September 29^th. The first guesstimate on third quarter GDP is scheduled for Thursday, October 27^th, just 12 days before the mid-term congressional elections.

The second quarter numbers will be bad. How can we tell? The White House, which certainly has the advance numbers, is trying to redefine what indicates a recession, away from the standard and simple two straight quarters of decline in GDP, to “a holistic look at the data.”

A clue: whenever anyone uses the adjective “holistic” to describe something, you know that bovine feces is about to follow.

The initial estimate of first quarter GDP was -1.4%, but by the third report, it was down to -1.6%. With the one negative quarter in the books, if the second quarter also shows economic contraction, everyone would say we’re in a recession .  .  . and the White House can’t have that!

Well, Thursday isn’t here yet, but the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta had its own early guesstimate:

Latest estimate: -1.6 percent — July 19, 2022

The GDPNow model estimate for real GDP growth (seasonally adjusted annual rate) in the second quarter of 2022 is -1.6 percent on July 19, down from -1.5 percent on July 15. After this morning’s housing starts report from the US Census Bureau, the nowcast of second-quarter real residential investment growth decreased from -8.8 percent to -10.1 percent.

The next GDPNow update is Wednesday, July 27. Please see the “Release Dates” tab below for a list of upcoming releases.

It’s only a guesstimate, but, then again, so is the ‘official’ first estimate of the Bureau of Economic Analysis! While -1.6% could be off slightly, it’s highly unlikely that it would be off enough to signal actual growth rather than economic contraction.

In other words, a recession, the dreaded “r” word the Biden Administration wants desperately to avoid.

So, they’ll redefine away from the “r” word, and hope that the credentialed media will go along with it. The trouble is that the credentialed media are no longer the only media in town, and you can bet your bottom euro that the Republicans will pound, pound, pound on that word.

It won’t even be difficult, because inflation has hit, hard. As we previously noted, inflation has been creeping inexorably up, hitting 9.1% year-over-year in June. Naturally, President Biden wanted to dispute the figures, calling them “out of date,” but nevertheless telling Americans he was going to do something about it.

In one regard, he’s right: fuel prices have declined since their maximum on June 14^th, but they are still significantly higher than they were at this time last year, and the inflation figures are based on the same month the previous year. The national average for regular gasoline was $4.467 per gallon on Wednesday, July 20^th, certainly down from $5.014 in mid June, but it was $3.16 at the end of July last year. That’s a 41.36% increase in one year, and 83.60% over the $2.433 in July of 2020. The overall 9.1% inflation number might come down a bit from June’s, but not a lot.

It was back in 2016 that I first noted Heather Long’s article on CNN Money:

The U.S. unemployment rate is only 4.9%, but 57% of Americans believe it’s a lot higher than that, according to a new survey by the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University.

The general public has “extremely little factual knowledge” about the job market and labor force, Rutgers found.

It’s another example of how experts on Wall Street and in Washington see the economy differently than the regular Joe. Many of the nation’s top economic experts say that America is “near full employment.” The unemployment rate has actually been at or below 5% for almost a year — millions of people have found jobs in what is the best period of hiring since the late 1990s.

But regular people appear to have their doubts about how healthy America’s employment picture is. Nearly a third of those survey by Rutgers believe unemployment is actually at 9%, or higher.

I pointed out than that while the ‘official’ U-3 unemployment rate was 4.9%, the U-6 unemployment rate for August, 2016 was 9.7%,^[1]U-6 unemployment is defined as “Total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force. Persons marginally attached to the labor force are those who currently are neither working … Continue reading not too far off of the ‘common people’s’ estimate that it was “9%, or higher.”

The point is simple: what the public feel is more important than what government officials say. If President Biden and his minions keep telling people that inflation is coming down, but the public keep seeing the prices of everything increase, who are they going to believe, the government, or their own eyes?

The Democrats will try to mealy-mouth the definition of recession, but when recessions come, people feel them, feel them in their bones. The price of everything is going up, and credit is tighter. Rents are increasing, and home purchase prices continue to rise. When people have to put more and more of their paychecks into the gasoline tank, that means less and less in their wallets for other things.

My good friend and occasional blog pinch-hitter William Teach noted this morning how some on the left are claiming that, by allowing contrarian views to be presented, the media are hurting the fight against global warming climate change.

“The devastating heat wave in Europe this week is a reminder that we need to take urgent action to slow human-caused warming, but the media is still giving air to the opinions of people who do not believe there is cause for alarm, which makes the problem seem less dire than it actually is,” said David Rapp, a psychologist and professor at Northwestern’s School of Education and Social Policy (SESP) who coauthored the research.

The argument that climate change is not man made has been incontrovertibly disproven by science again and again, yet many Americans believe that the global crisis is either not real, not of our making, or both, in part because the news media has given climate change deniers a platform in the name of balanced reporting, according to the researchers.

The left, who used to be so very strongly for freedom of speech and of the press, sure aren’t for it anymore, and want to push the credentialed media into restricting language, so they can shape the debate in ways in which they see an advantage. We have previously noted how The New York Times has given OpEd space to Andrew Marantz, a writer for The New Yorker, to claim that “Free Speech Is Killing Us: Noxious language online is causing real-world violence. What can we do about it?” Twitter now bans “deadnaming” and “misgendering”, not allowing any discussion of whether the ‘transgendered’ really are the sex they claim to be rather than their biological sex — something the Times gave Chad Malloy^[1]Chad Malloy is a male who believes he is actually a woman, and who goes by the faux name “Parker” Malloy. OpEd space to claim that such censorship actually promotes freedom of speech. We have pointed out how National Public Radio’s Laurel Wamsley gave space for Alex Schmider, associate director of transgender representation at GLAAD — yeah, a real unbiased source there! — to compare “using someone’s correct pronouns to pronouncing their name correctly – ‘a way of respecting them and referring to them in a way that’s consistent and true to who they are.'”

Mr Schmider did tell the truth in one important way. Using a ‘transgendered persons’ preferred pronouns and sexual identity terms is meant to be “respecting them and referring to them in a way that’s consistent and true to who they are.” Miss Wamsley put it as “a crucial way to signal courtesy and acceptance.” At bottom, it is an attempt to coerce “acceptance” by claiming it is only courtesy.

The unasked question is — and the author never added anything into her article which would have paid any attention to those who disagree — what if someone does not accept the idea that Bruce Jenner is really now a woman, or that anyone can somehow change his sex?

It begins with a falsehood. “Sex,” Miss Wamsley wrote, “refers to a person’s biological status and is typically assigned at birth, usually on the basis of external anatomy. Sex is typically categorized as male, female or intersex.” This is wholly untrue. While we might forgive His Majesty King Henry VIII for believing that Catherine of Aragon or Anne Boleyn were somehow responsible for his first two surviving children being daughters, the role of the X and Y chromosomes in determining the sex of mammals, including humans, has been known for over a century. Sex is not somehow “assigned” at birth; sex is determined at conception, depending upon whether the sperm which fertilized the egg carries the X or Y chromosome. We recognize the sex of a newborn child by visual examination of the child, but the characteristics which indicate sex developed long before birth, during gestation, as programmed in by the developing child’s DNA.

It’s kind of amusing that some couples have “gender reveal parties” is sex isn’t “assigned” until birth. 🙂

When you read or hear someone talking about sex being assigned at birth, you know automatically the pure bovine feces is about to follow.

From National Review:

AP Stylebook Issues Guide for Transgender Coverage

by Abigail Anthony | Friday, July 22, 2022 | 7:23 PM EDT

The Associated Press Stylebook, which for decades has served as the default style manual for most news organizations, has issued a “Topical Guide” for transgender coverage that encourages writers to use “unbiased language” and to “avoid false balance [by] giving a platform to unqualified claims or sources in the guise of balancing a story by including all views.”

There it is again: the AP does not want the media to present the view that people cannot really change their sex.

Yet the guidance appears to explicitly embrace the language and claims of transgender activists, a move likely to steer newsrooms away from objectively framing the issue.

The AP Stylebook has issued prior guidance related to gender and sexuality, and some of that is repackaged in the Topical Guide. But it does include some updates, together providing an extensive reference for journalists.

The Transgender Coverage Topical Guide explains: “A person’s sex and gender are usually assigned at birth by parents or attendants and can turn out to be inaccurate. Experts say gender is a spectrum, not a binary structure consisting of only men and women, that can vary among societies and can change over time.” The guide encourages writers to refer to subjects according to their preferred gender identity. The guide condemns “deadnaming,” or referring to a transgender person’s previous name, because that “can be akin to using a slur and can cause feelings of gender dysphoria to resurface.”

Of course, sex cannot change, and sex is recognized at birth, not assigned at birth.

The guide describes the term “sex” by explaining “a person’s sex is usually assigned at birth by parents or attendants, sometimes inaccurately” and further advises writers to “avoid terms like ‘biological male,’ which opponents of transgender rights sometimes use to oversimplify sex and gender, is often misleading shorthand for ‘assigned male at birth,’ and is redundant because sex is inherently biological.”

It is certainly true that “biological male” or “biological female” are redundant, but the formulation has been pushed by the fact that there are those in the world who claim to be the sex they are not. That the Topical Guide claims that “biological male . . . is often misleading shorthand for ‘assigned male at birth,’” is inherently stupid, because it assumes that sex is ‘assigned’ at birth.

There’s more at the original. There are those who claim that referring to a ‘transgendered’ person by the names, pronouns, and honorifics they claim, rather than those which represent what they actually are, is a simple matter of courtesy, and courtesy is important.

But is it courteous to ask someone to lie, especially to lie to himself? That is what the Associated Press, what the ‘transgendered,’ are asking; they are asking people who know that Bruce Jenner isn’t really “Caitlin,” that Ellen Page isn’t really “Elliot,” that Will Thomas isn’t really “Lia,” to lie to the public and to themselves, to perpetuate, through language, something they do not believe.

Well, I refuse. At The First Street Journal we have our own Stylebook, a Stylebook used by almost no one else,^[2]Unlike the Associated Press Stylebook, for which subscribers must pay, and which is why I have been unable to provide the hyperlink to the original, our Stylebook is free and open to anyone who … Continue reading but here we do not lie.

To be “courteous,” to use the terms the ‘transgender’ activists and the Associated Press and the credentialed media want you to use is to concede the argument, is to surrender on what you know to be true.

Don’t concede, don’t surrender. Be true to what you know to be true.
________________________________

Cross-posted on American Free News Network.

Congratulations to Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney, District Attorney Larry Krasner, and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw: the City of Brotherly Love has, as of 11:59 PM EDT on Monday, July 18, 2022, hit 300 murders for the year!

Of course, the city is still behind last year’s pace, but not by much, not by much, just 1.32% down from last year’s 304 killings as of the same date.

Monday was the 199^th day of the year, so Philly is seeing 1.5075 murders per day, which projects out to 550 for the year. Calculated another way, taking the percentage of total murders for the year compared to 2021, I can also project 553 homicides.

But those numbers might be a touch low. As I noted on July 9^th, Philly saw a drop off in the homicide rate between July 9^th and the end of the Labor Day holiday weekend last year, but, at least in the last ten days, I have seen no evidence of such a drop-off this year.

For four straight years, 2013 through 2016, Philly saw fewer than 300 murders for the entire year.

As of 8:32 AM EDT, The Philadelphia Inquirer hasn’t even noticed, nor are there any stories on either the website main page or crime page.

Update! As of 1:04 PM EDT, the Inquirer still has nothing on hitting 300 murders.

Update! The Inky has gone all cool, and rather than putting time stamps on their articles, you see things like “Updated an hour ago”. Well, it’s 6:38 PM EDT, and “updated an hour ago,” Chris Palmer and Mensah H Dean wrote the Inquirer article finally noting that yeah, there have been 300 killings in the City of Brotherly Love.

Three hundred people have been killed in homicides in Philadelphia in fewer than 200 days this year, according to police — a grim tally that has been fueled by an alarmingly violent July, during which 43 people have died in just 2½ weeks.

Police said the year’s 300th killing occurred just before 10 p.m. Monday in West Philadelphia, when 18-year-old Lameer Boyd was fatally shot while standing on the 500 block of West 52nd Street. Investigators recovered more than 50 rounds at the scene from three guns, said Chief Inspector Frank Vanore, and detectives were seeking video and other evidence to learn more about the crime. No one was arrested.

The killing meant the city has reached 300 annual homicides at a rate surpassed only by last year, when the troubling milestone was reached on July 16. By the end of 2021, police said 562 people had been slain in homicides, the highest total in at least half a century.

Few other years in recent memory come close to rivaling the city’s current level of gun violence; as recently as 2017, the city recorded fewer than 300 homicides for the entire year.

We noted that 9.1% June year-over-year inflation rate, and now President Biden tells us that it just ain’t so, but he’s going to deal with it anyway:

Biden Reacts to ‘Unacceptably High’ Inflation Report By Laying Out Three Point Plan to Address Rising Prices

By Colby Hall | Wednesday, July 13, 2022 | 10:16 AM

President Joe Biden reacted to the record high inflation report that was released Wednesday morning by first dismissing the numbers as “out-of-date,” but then laying out his plans to address rising prices.

Hey, it is his administration releasing the figures; is he calling his people liars?

The Consumer Price Index rose to 9.1% for the month of June, which was higher than analysts expected, and the highest rate of inflation since 1981. Biden’s statement opens by calling price increases “unacceptably high” but also said that it was “out-of-date” due to a decrease in gas prices that he says is data not reflected. It is true that gas prices have fallen for nearly 30 days straight, but are still well over a dollar higher per gallon than they were a year ago at this time.

Gasoline prices may have fallen for “nearly 30 days straight,” but fourteen of those 30 days have been in July, not June.

We need Gerald Ford’s “Whip Inflation Now” buttons!

Biden once again blamed the economy on “Putin’s unconscionable aggression” in Ukraine that has disrupted global markets, but perhaps not as much as the White House would like Americans to believe. He also noted the market reaction to “Covid-related challenges” which some might see as a more accurate description of the true cause and effect.

“Tackling inflation is my top priority – we need to make more progress, more quickly, in getting price increases under control,” Biden revealed in his statement before listing a three-part plan. First, he intended to do everything he can to lower gas prices. Second, he is urging Congress to pass legislation that will help lower prices on everyday items like groceries and prescription drugs. Finally, he pledges to work to halt what he calls Republican efforts to raise taxes on working-class people.

If the President could do anything about gasoline prices, shouldn’t he have done so already? It’s not as though fuel prices were great in May!

What, I have to ask, can be done legislatively about “prices on everyday items like groceries and prescription drugs”? Profit margins for grocery stores are small, between 1% and 3%, and if you shrink those, you run them out of business. Smaller grocery stores, like convenience stores and bodegas, have higher profit margins — other than on gasoline — sometimes up to 7.5%, but those are depending on price, not volume like larger grocery stores, to stay open. Anything the Administration does to bring down food prices drives those places out of business.

And, of course, Republicans aren’t te ones trying to raise taxes or prices on the American people; the Democrats are the ones trying to do that!

The government tried everything from 1974 to 1982 to slash inflation, but it was ended the old-fashioned way: with a serious recession. That’s what’s going to happen again.