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The problem is not mass incarceration; the problem is that not enough people are incarcerated, for not a long enough time

Larry Krasner, the police-hating defense attorney sponsored by George Soros to become District Attorney in Philadelphia, really, really doesn’t like putting criminals in jail. He is a strong believer in “restorative justice,” and his office issued, on May 26, 2022, a paper claiming that their “restorative justice” programs have worked just spectacularly well.

So it is no surprise that Mr Krasner doesn’t like it when independent studies show that his policies have led to increases in crime!

New study by former DA links Philadelphia’s high homicide rate to a drop in criminal sentencings

Deprosecution practices started well before DA Larry Krasner’s time in office, research shows

by Kristen Johnson | Monday, August 15, 2022 | 7:25 AM EDT

PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Philadelphia’s high homicide rate may be linked to a rise in deprosecution practices, according to a recent study by the former district attorney of Chester County.

For the third year in a row, homicides in Philadelphia are at an all-time high, and fewer criminal acts are being charged or sought in the city.

According to prosecution research — specifically, sentencing data — former Chester County DA Tom Hogan found prosecutions had dropped 70% over the course of about five to six years in Philadelphia.

“The results that we come up with is that there was an increase of roughly 74 homicides per year from 2015 to 2019 in Philadelphia associated with deprosecution,” he explained.

Hogan, who is also a former criminal defense attorney, served as DA of Chester County from 2012 to 2020. He now works in private practice and is seeking a Ph.D. in criminology next year at the University of Cambridge.

He partnered with the University of Pennsylvania for this study and spent months researching deprosecution. The study found the spike started well before Philly’s current top prosecutor, Larry Krasner — who has faced criticism for his progressive practices — and actually began during DA Seth Williams’ time in office.

“The sentencings decrease by 35% in 2015 over prior trends,” said Hogan. “Then what you see by 2019 is sentencings in Philadelphia are down almost 70%, so that is a huge drop.”

The report makes it clear that the trends in reduced prosecutions and sentencing began under District Attorney Seth Williams, who was himself convicted in federal court. Faced with 29 counts, Mr Williams pleaded guilty to one count of bribery and was sentenced to five years in prison. Due to the completion of a drug rehabilitation program and time off for good behavior while in prison, he was released in just under three years.

Mr Krasner, who campaigned on reducing prosecutions for drug arrests, reviewing old cases to look for prosecutorial misconduct, and holding the police accountable, was elected in 2017, and took office on New Year’s Day of 2018.

So, what happened? While Mr Williams was District Attorney, homicides showed a slight increase from Lynne Abraham’s previous tenure, going from 302 to 306 in 2010, Mr Williams’ first year, then to 326 and 331, before dropping to 246, 248, 280, 277, and a final jump to 315 in Mr Williams last year. Michael Nutter began his two terms as Mayor in 2008, bringing Charles Ramsey along with him as Police Commissioner.

Under Mr Krasner, and Mayor Jim Kenney, homicides immediately jumped to 353 in 2018 and 356 in 2019. But here’s the kicker:

The study does not include 2020 or 2021 data due to anomalies caused by the pandemic and civil unrest.

Thud!

Homicides soared to 499, one short of the record of 500, in 2020, and then not only broke that record, but completely shattered it, rising to 562 in 2021. The study doesn’t include the worst of Mr Krasner’s term!

It’s August 17th, noy quite 2/3 through the year, so we don’t know what 2022’s final numbers will be, but as of 11:59 PM EDT on Tuesday, August 16th, the city is six murders ahead of the same date last year, 345 to 339, a 1.770% increase.

There are a couple of different ways to do the numbers. 345 ÷ 228, the number of days elapsed in the year, = 1.513 murders per day, multiplied by 365 = 552 projected killings. However, if you multiply 562, last year’s total murders, by the current 1.770% increase, the total jumps to 572.

Mr Krasner, of course, does not want to accept any responsibility for the huge surge in homicides:

Hogan said making fewer sentencings was a “policy choice” that started with Williams but “increased dramatically” under Krasner.

When asked, Krasner criticized the study.

“[Hogan] is a traditional prosecutor. He is not a scientist in his field,” said Krasner. “He does not deserve to be a scientist and we respectfully disagree.”

Uh huh, right:

Tom Hogan is an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He writes on the issues of the criminal justice system, public safety, terrorism, quantitative analysis, and politics. Hogan has been published in numerous academic journals. In addition, he has been published in and/or quoted by media outlets including City Journal, RealClearPolitics, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Prior to becoming affiliated with the Manhattan Institute, Hogan has served in multiple roles. He practiced law at a major international law firm and litigation boutique, representing Fortune 500 companies and individuals in complex civil litigation and criminal investigations. He served as a federal prosecutor for the U.S. Department of Justice. He was elected twice as the Chester County District Attorney in Pennsylvania, a county with over 500,000 citizens. He was the chair of the Liberty Mid-Atlantic HIDTA group, coordinating drug law enforcement for state and local organizations across Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware. He has worked with elected officials at the federal, state, and local level on drafting legislation and addressing critical policy issues.

Hogan received his undergraduate degree from Dartmouth College and his legal degree from the University of Virginia School of Law. While practicing law, he also received a Master of Science degree in Criminology from the University of Pennsylvania, concentrating on statistical issues and data science in the criminal justice system. He has taught lawyers, law students, and graduate students from multiple disciplines on issues including criminal procedure, trial advocacy, ethics, officer-involved shootings, and statistical problems.

In other words, Mr Hogan actually is an expert in his field. But, because Mr Krasner doesn’t like the numbers, he has decided that “He is not a scientist in his field,” and “He does not deserve to be a scientist.”

What Mr Hogan found was a strong statistical correlation between reduced prosecution and sentencing, with the greatly increased homicide rate. It’s an old, old truth: correlation does not prove causation, and the correlation Mr Hogan found does not prove that Mr Krasner’s soft-on-criminals policies have caused the homicide rate to increase. However, we have long accepted strong correlations as almost certain causes when it comes to things like smoking causing lung cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, even though not all smokers develop lung cancer or COPD.

But we already know that Mr Krasner’s lenient policies have caused the death of one Philadelphia Police Officer.

One of the people treated leniently by Mr Krasner and his office, and who wasn’t in jail on Friday, March 13, 2020, was Hasan Elliot, 21. How did the District Attorney’s office treat Mr Elliot, a known gang-banger?

  • Mr Elliott, then 18 years old, was arrested in June 2017 on gun- and drug-possession charges stemming after threatening a neighbor with a firearm. The District Attorney’s office granted him a plea bargain arrangement on January 24, 2018, and he was sentenced to 9 to 23 months in jail, followed by three years’ probation. However, he was paroled earlier than that, after seven months in jail.
  • Mr Elliot soon violated parole by failing drug tests and failing to make his meetings with his parole officer.
  • Mr Elliott was arrested and charged with possession of cocaine on January 29, 2019. This was another parole violation, but Mr Krasner’s office did not attempt to have Mr Elliot returned to jail to finish his sentence, nor make any attempts to get serious bail on the new charges; he was released on his own recognizance.
  • After Mr Elliot failed to appear for his scheduled drug-possession trial on March 27, 2019, prosecutors dropped those charges against him.

On that Friday the 13th, Police Corporal James O’Connor IV, 46, was part of a Philadelphia police SWAT team trying to serve a predawn arrest warrant on Mr Elliott, from a March 2019 killing. Mr Elliot greeted the SWAT team with a hail of bullets, and Corporal O’Connor was killed. Had Mr Elliot been in jail, as he could have been due to parole violations, had Mr Krasner’s office treated him seriously, Corporal O’Connor would have gone home safely to his wife that day. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported:

Philadelphia Police Officers and FOP members block District Attorney Larry Krasner from entering the hospital to meet with slain Police Corporal James O’Connor’s family.


Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 5 president John McNesby also has criticized Krasner, saying his policies led to the killing of O’Connor. “Unfortunately, he’s murdered by somebody that should have never been on the street,” McNesby said. McNesby also said FOP members and police officers formed a human barricade to block Krasner from entering the hospital Friday to see O’Connor’s family.

James O’Connor is stone-cold graveyard dead because District Attorney Krasner and his minions, in their abhorrence of mass incarceration, let a repeat offender, one with a record of carrying firearms, using and selling drugs, and flouting his required probation meetings, off the hook. He was a guy who needed to be incarcerated, and who didn’t even need to be tried again to get him locked up, but Mr Krasner and his office left him out on the streets, even though the police had him in physical custody on January 29, 2019.

Did the lenient treatment do Mr Elliot any good? Had Mr Krasner and his minions treated Mr Elliot seriously, he’d have been in jail on that fateful Friday the 13th, but he’d also be looking at getting out of prison eventually. Now, Mr Elliot, and four of his goons, are looking at spending the rest of their miserable lives in prison.

Amazingly enough, the Editorial Board of the Inquirer actually endorsed Mr Krasner for re-election in 2021, saying:

A complex, relatively recent spike in gun violence isn’t a reason to return to the mass incarceration regime of yesteryear, but a challenge to do better.

Yes, it actually is a reason to return to mass incarcerations! Despite Mr Krasner’s, and the Editorial Board’s, assertions, we know one thing with 100% certainty: a criminal locked up in SCI Phoenix can’t shoot someone in Strawberry Mansion or Kensington.

I have said it before: mass incarceration isn’t the problem. The problem is that not enough people are incarcerated, for not a long enough time. Tom Hogan has just proved that.

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Economics aren’t #woke

My good friend Robert Stacy McCain recently wrote about an article in Jezebel which claimed that normal men were going “unpartnered” because women’s “relationship standards” had been raised. Women might be willing to occasionally copulate with said lonely guys, but they weren’t really interested in anything more serious. I found the math strained, because unless you include homosexual males, the very people who ought to be excluded in an article about how normal men are having more difficulty finding women with whom to have serious relationships, the number of “partnered” men ought to equal the number of “partnered” normal women. Given that women slightly outnumber men, and that women live longer than men, the math Jezebel cited just doesn’t work out.

I was reminded of Mr McCain’s article when I read this one in The Wall Street Journal.

Inflation Widens Married Couples’ Money Lead Over Their Single Friends

Rapidly rising prices and more than two years of living in a pandemic increase the financial stress on those without pooled assets

by Julia Carpenter | Tuesday, August 16, 2022 | 7:14 AM EDT

It is better, financially, to be married than single, as has almost always been the case. But the money gap between young married couples and singles has widened, thanks to inflation and rising home prices.

The median net worth of married couples 25 to 34 years old was nearly nine times as much as the median net worth of single households in 2019, according to the most recent data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. In 2010, married households’ median net worth was four times as much. And now, after a spell of rapid inflation and more than two years of pandemic living, single people are getting left further behind, say economists at the Fed and elsewhere.

“This 25-to-34-year-old age is a time of transition, it’s a time of household formation, and I think it matters whether or not you can pool your financial resources with someone else,” said Lowell Ricketts, a data scientist for the Institute for Economic Equity at the St. Louis Fed.

Married people are being tested by inflation, too. It is just that they have a larger, shared cushion, often with two incomes and pooled assets. They hold a greater concentration of wealth and considerably less debt, according to research from the St. Louis Fed.

Having combined assets was particularly helpful over the past decade as many households’ wealth was compounded by rising housing prices and a strong stock market.

As people marry later, the number of sole-person households is growing, which means more single people are tackling multiple financial challenges entirely on their own. Over the past four decades, the number of sole-person households has nearly doubled, according to data from Freddie Mac. And by delaying marriage, many now struggle to access money milestones at the ages previous generations achieved them.

The article continues to tell us the woes of a 27-year-old single woman in Columbus, Ohio, who recently got a raise, which is allowing her to start saving a bit, but, for her, home ownership is still out of the question. The Journal’s photo of her slicing zucchini in the small, cramped, and cluttered kitchen in her rental apartment says a lot: she has a roof over her head and food on her table, but she’s still living a fairly modest lifestyle. To relate this to Mr McCain’s article, I will note that the woman in question does not really meet contemporary standards of physical attractiveness.

Further down:

When it comes to building wealth via homeownership, finding a smaller starter home—once the gateway for single people becoming homeowners—remains especially difficult as prices remain high, say economists. Housing affordability in June 2022 hit its worst level since June 1989, and home prices are up 44% over the past two years, according to data from real-estate brokerage Redfin Corp. With housing prices so high and starter-home inventory so low, more single people are struggling to find affordable houses to buy.

So, what happened in 1989? An economic downturn happened, a housing market crash. Interest rates soared again, and housing prices had to fall, or houses just wouldn’t sell. An economic downturn which eventually cost the elder George Bush the presidency in the 1992 election. We saw the same thing in the early 2000s, as housing just plain skipped the 2001-2 recession — I was amazed at how much concrete we were selling for homebuilding even as the unemployment rate soared — but the sub=prime mortgage lending market collapsed in 2007-8, and people who had bought during the bubble, with adjustable-rate mortgages were defaulting at record paces.

I can see something similar in the not-too-distant future.

The Journal article continues along the theme of singles, and primarily single women, being priced out of the housing market.

This is where married couples have one of their largest advantages. Applying for a mortgage, these couples can work together to create an attractive application as well as amass the necessary money for a healthy down payment.

Single women face additional hurdles to generating wealth.

The gender wage gap begins to widen as early as three years after college graduation, a Wall Street Journal analysis found. Women also live significantly longer than men, which puts added pressure on them to finance their retirement years solo.

“These are scary times for anyone, but they’re particularly scary times, I think, for the reasons we have cited, for single women,” said Jill Gianola, a financial planner and the founder of Gianola Financial Planning.

This, you see, is the problem: social customs may have changed, customs which no longer have others asking, “What’s wrong with him?”, or her, if they don’t get married by the time they’re 22. But economic laws aren’t #woke, economic laws don’t care that you want to party hearty until you’re thirty. The reality of economics and the passage of time mean that if you are delaying adulthood, you are also delaying your economic advance. It might be more fun to take your whole paycheck and spend it wastefully, but those are years in which you should be building your career and setting yourself up for financial success later in life.

There was more in the Journal article, this time about a married couple, a couple which appear to have married a bit late, but one which were able to work out the husband’s pre-existing $10,000+ credit card debt by virtue of being serious and by the fact that they were paying for one residence for the two of them. When economic problems arise, there are two of them to work things out.

The way people behaved in our economy and our society in the 1950s might seem just horribly, horribly old fashioned and just not with it, but the simple fact is that they worked for people, because they made economic sense.

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How Daniel Panneton used 1,183 words to tell us that he’s a great researcher who doesn’t understand a single thing about his subject

Daniel Panneton’s Twitter bio. Click to enlarge.

Daniel Panneton tells us, in his Twitter biography, that he is a “Museums worker and online hate researcher”. He also tells us that he is very afraid to let the Unapproved see his tweets. I looked, but was unable to find a significantly more detailed biography of Mr Panneton. A writer for The Atlantic, he has had published several other articles from which anyone who can read can discern his very much #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 leftist bias.

And now? This obviously well-read has decided that traditional Catholics are now evil reich-wing Protestants! I’m pretty sure that both Catholics and our separated brethren wouldn’t see it that way.

How Extremist Gun Culture Co-Opted the Rosary

The AR-15 is a sacred object among Christian nationalists. Now “radical-traditional” Catholics are bringing a sacrament of their own to the movement.

By Daniel Panneton | Sunday, August 14, 2022 | 8:00 AM EDT

Just as the AR-15 rifle has become a sacred object for Christian nationalists in general, the rosary has acquired a militaristic meaning for radical-traditional (or “rad trad”) Catholics. On this extremist fringe, rosary beads have been woven into a conspiratorial politics and absolutist gun culture. These armed radical traditionalists have taken up a spiritual notion that the rosary can be a weapon in the fight against evil and turned it into something dangerously literal.

While some people might not understand that a crucifix is more commonly Catholic than Protestant, almost no one would mistake that a rosary is a Catholic symbol. What Mr Panneton has missed is that no one who prays the rosary these days is out shooting people.

Their social-media pages are saturated with images of rosaries draped over firearms, warriors in prayer, Deus Vult (“God wills it”) crusader memes, and exhortations for men to rise up and become Church Militants. Influencers on platforms such as Instagram share posts referencing “everyday carry” and “gat check” (gat is slang for “firearm”) that include soldiers’ “battle beads,” handguns, and assault rifles. One artist posts illustrations of his favorite Catholic saints, clergy, and influencers toting AR-15-style rifles labeled sanctum rosarium alongside violently homophobic screeds that are celebrated by social-media accounts with thousands of followers.The theologian and historian Massimo Faggioli has described a network of conservative Catholic bloggers and commentary organizations as a “Catholic cyber-militia” that actively campaigns against LGBTQ acceptance in the Church.

Considering that the Bible is very explicit in its condemnation of homosexual activity, and the Catechism affirms that,[2]§2357 Homosexuality refers to relations between men or between women who experience an exclusive or predominant sexual attraction toward persons of the same sex. It has taken a great variety of … Continue reading it is the duty of all Catholics to fight against the approval of homosexual activity. To Mr Panneton, this is just wholly, wholly wrong.

These rad-trad rosary-as-weapon memes represent a social-media diffusion of such messaging, and they work to integrate ultraconservative Catholicism with other aspects of online far-right culture. The phenomenon might be tempting to dismiss as mere trolling or merchandising, and ironical provocations based on traditionalist Catholic symbols do exist, but the far right’s constellations of violent, racist, and homophobic online milieus are well documented for providing a pathway to radicalization and real-world terrorist attacks. The rosary—in these hands—is anything but holy. But for millions of believers, the beads, which provide an aide-mémoire for a sequence of devotional prayers, are a widely recognized symbol of Catholicism and a source of strength. And many take genuine sustenance from Catholic theology’s concept of the Church Militant and the tradition of regarding the rosary as a weapon against Satan. As Pope Francis said in a 2020 address, “There is no path to holiness … without spiritual combat,” and Francis is only one of many Church officials who have endorsed the idea of the rosary as an armament in that fight.

I will admit to some amusement that this article was published on Sunday, August 14th, the same day as this Gospel reading in our Catholic Churches:

Luke 12:49 “I have come to cast fire upon the earth; and how I wish it were already kindled!
50 But I have a baptism to undergo, and how distressed I am until it is accomplished!
51 Do you suppose that I came to grant peace on earth? I tell you, no, but rather division;
52 for from now on five members in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three.
53 They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.”

Mr Panneton has managed to wholly misunderstand what Pope Francis has said. “Spiritual combat” means to fight, with prayer, for the right ideas.

However, this is where the author truly shows how little he understands about his subject. There is no greater enemy of the “Church Militant” than Pope Francis, who has been doing his best to stamp out the Tridentine, or Traditional Latin, Mass.

Daniel Panneton, photo from his protected Twitter profile.

In mainstream Catholicism, the rosary-as-weapon is not an intrinsically harmful interpretation of the sacramental, and this symbolism has a long history. In the 1930s and ’40s, the ultramontane Catholic student publication Jeunesse Étudiante Catholique regularly used the concept to rally the faithful. But the modern radical-traditionalist Catholic movement—which generally rejects the Second Vatican Council’s reforms—is far outside the majority opinion in the Roman Catholic Church in America. Many prominent American Catholic bishops advocate for gun control, and after the Uvalde school shooting, Bishop Daniel Flores of Brownsville, Texas, lamented the way some Americans “sacralize death’s instruments.”Militia culture, a fetishism of Western civilization, and masculinist anxieties have become mainstays of the far right in the U.S.—and rad-trad Catholics have now taken up residence in this company. Their social-media accounts commonly promote accelerationist and survivalist content, along with combat-medical and tactical training, as well as memes depicting balaclava-clad gunmen that draw on the “terrorwave” or “warcore” aesthetic that is popular in far-right circles.

Like such networks, radical-traditional Catholics sustain their own cottage industry of goods and services that reinforces the radicalization. Rosaries are common among the merchandise on offer—some made of cartridge casings, and complete with gun-metal-finish crucifixes. One Catholic online store, which describes itself as “dedicated to offering battle-ready products and manuals to ‘stand firm against the tactics of the devil’” (a New Testament reference), sells replicas of the rosaries issued to American soldiers during the First World War as “combat rosaries.” Discerning consumers can also buy a “concealed carry” permit for their combat rosary and a sacramental storage box resembling an ammunition can. In 2016, the pontifical Swiss Guard accepted a donation of combat rosaries; during a ceremony at the Vatican, their commander described the gift as “the most powerful weapon that exists on the market.”

The militarism also glorifies a warrior mentality and notions of manliness and male strength. This conflation of the masculine and the military is rooted in wider anxieties about Catholic manhood—the idea that it is in crisis has some currency among senior Church figures and lay organizations. In 2015, Bishop Thomas Olmsted of Phoenix issued an apostolic exhortation calling for a renewal of traditional conceptions of Catholic masculinity titled “Into the Breach,” which led the Knights of Columbus, an influential fraternal order, to produce a video series promoting Olmsted’s ideas. But among radical-traditional Catholic men, such concerns take an extremist turn, rooted in fantasies of violently defending one’s family and church from marauders.

You know, this reminds me of Amanda Marcotte’s argument in her 2008 book, It’s a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments. Miss Marcotte had been arguing, for a long time — and still does — that evil reich wing conservatives don’t just want to ban prenatal infanticide, but artificial contraception as well. But when it came to actually documenting her claim, the only thing with which she could come up was Quiverfull, a belief set more than an organization, the adherents to which, according to a 2006 guesstimate, range in “the thousands to the low tens of thousands”.

Miss Marcotte managed to conflate maybe 10,000 families to a nationwide assault on contraception, and now, Mr Panneton is conflating the rosary, something millions of Catholics have, and something I have hanging from the rear-view mirror of my very masculine Ford F-150, as meaning I have an AR-15 that I’m ready to use to kill queers, abortionists, illegal immigrants, liberals, girly boys and Novus Ordo Catholics.

There’s more at Mr Panneton’s 1,183-word original, but it’s a lot of the same, the conflation of a small number of people into a national menace, and the possession of a rosary as a visible symbol, practically a swastika, showing just how horribly evil we are.

I have a rosary hanging from the rear view mirror of my F-150.

Of course, some of his sources are silly ones, such as citing Salon to prove that Catholics are a “growing contingent” of Christian nationalism, and Media Matters for America complaining that Twitter should take action against people calling groomers, groomers. About the only thing he failed to mention was Libs of TikTok.

The author’s tactics are familiar. The New Yorker noted a complaint by a black United States Postal Service worker that he was the subject of racial discrimination because some other workers wore caps with the Gadsden flag, and some have even called the thirteen-star Betsy Ross flag a symbol of hate. The old “OK” hand sign has been labeled a hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League.

There are two things going on here. One is that the left are trying, once again, to control what speech or expression is acceptable, in an attempt to limit the terms of debate by limiting how the debate may be held. If Mr Panneton had his way, if I drove to a county commissioner’s meeting with the rosary visible in my F-150, I would be ostracized and, who knows, perhaps even escorted off the property by the police for having the alt-right symbol of a rosary.

But there’s more. Mr Panneton’s motives are really pretty clear: he wants to attack Catholicism itself, by trying to make actual Catholics into Enemies of the Republic, people who, if seen with a rosary, ought to be shunned as Nazis, reported to the police, and fired from their jobs. After all, we are all heavily armed, right?

Nevertheless, he’s being pretty stupid. Other than topics of sexual morality, which are explicitly set down in the Bible, Catholic priests and theologians tend to be pretty liberal politically. Perhaps alienating people who be (mostly) your allies isn’t the wisest thing he could do.

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

  • §2357 Homosexuality refers to relations between men or between women who experience an exclusive or predominant sexual attraction toward persons of the same sex. It has taken a great variety of forms through the centuries and in different cultures. Its psychological genesis remains largely unexplained. Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.” They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.
  • §2358 The number of men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not negligible. This inclination, which is objectively disordered, constitutes for most of them a trial. They must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided. These persons are called to fulfill God’s will in their lives and, if they are Christians, to unite to the sacrifice of the Lord’s Cross the difficulties they may encounter from their condition.
  • §2359 Homosexual persons are called to chastity. By the virtues of self-mastery that teach them inner freedom, at times by the support of disinterested friendship, by prayer and sacramental grace, they can and should gradually and resolutely approach Christian perfection.
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Taylor Lorenz is just hopping mad!

Remember Taylor Lorenz? As we have noted previously, Miss Lorenz is The Washington Post author over whom the newspaper was paying owner Jeff Bezos’ hard earned dollars to Twitter to promote an article doxing a conservative on Twitter? The image to the right is a screen capture, but if you click on it, it will take you to the original tweet.

Miss Lorenz spent a lot of time investigating the Twitter account Libs of TikTok. LoTT’s schtick is to find the silliest things leftists put on the social media site Tik Tok, and snark them for sensible people on Twitter. Basically, LoTT is mocking people for their own exposed stupidity. My good friend Amanda Marcotte of Salon loved that LoTT was doxed, doubtlessly hoping that Chaya Raichik, a Brooklyn-based real estate salesperson and LoTT creator would lose her job, and her posting last April was a hope that Mr Musk’s buyout of Twitter results in the whole thing being killed.

Elon Musk is buying Twitter for a sum of money so large as to be meaningless to all normal people. That’s enraging many or most Twitter users, but it also feels appropriate. After all, that platform is largely controlled by trolls. So why shouldn’t one of the biggest trolls on the platform own it outright? It’s a little like Snoop Dogg buying Death Row Records. Of course, trolls never wrote “Gin and Juice.” They are just draining the life out of our democracy.

As I argued a couple weeks ago, when Musk first started making sounds about buying Twitter, his plan to let the already obnoxious troll problem spiral out of control will likely sound the death knell for the social media behemoth. Trolls are good for business on social media, up to a point. But if they take over too much, they run all the normal people off. Then the trolls leave too, because they’re hapless and forlorn without non-trolls to troll. Soon it’s just a ghost town, like Donald Trump’s utterly pointless platform Truth Social.

That’s rather amusing, given that Miss Marcotte had posted 22 separate Twitter threads dated April 25th through 10:40 AM on the 26th, to promote her own sites and writing.[1]Miss Marcotte has me blocked, but all I have to do is hit [Ctrl][Alt][N] and it takes me to the private browsing screen, in which I am not logged in on Twitter, and I can see what she has posted. She used her willingness to post profanity on the now-defunct website Pandagon to build an ‘edgy’ audience, so it’s difficult not to laugh at her calling other people trolls. It was just last Thursday that she complained that conservatives wanting to keep sexually loaded works out of school libraries means that they want to ban and burn books.

LOL!

Well, Miss Lorenz was not very concerned about other people’s privacy, or potential harm to them, when she doxxed Miss Raichik, but she certainly is concerned about potential risks to herself! Very, very concerned about the new guidance from the Centers for Disease Control over COVID-19, which basically says that there’s no need for serious restrictions, Miss Lorenz tweeted:

Miss Lorenz is, herself, immunocompromised. She wrote:

Disabled/medically vulnerable ppl shouldn’t have to risk their lives to participate in society, nor are most even given that choice. Disabled people also have to work, go to school, grocery shop, go to the doctor’s office. We are human beings in the world just like everyone else. As someone working in media who’s immunocompromised and medically vulnerable I really wish we as an industry hired more disabled writers and did more to center vulnerable people in our coverage, esp on COVID. What’s happening right now is so horrific on such a massive scale

I would point out here that the CDC are not run by evil reich-wing Republicans, but that the current administration is under all sweetness-and-light liberal Joe Biden. She did note that, sort of, when she said that such a view is “championed by liberals and large media institutions.” The truth is simple: even if the left were not as tired of silly mask rules — and we did note how Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney is firing the last vaccine holdouts, even though the vaccines neither prevent people from contracting SARS-CoV-2 nor transmitting it to others — as are conservatives, there’s an election coming up in 12 weeks, and the Democrats are doing everything that they can to cut their anticipated losses.

I do not want Miss Lorenz to contract the virus, but the fact is that almost everybody eventually will. Realistically, I can more reasonably hope that when Miss Lorenz contracts it — if she hasn’t already — her symptoms will be very mild or even non-existent. But her fears are not enough to override the desires of the vast majority of people in this country, people who have long ago thrown away their silly masks.

References

References
↑1 Miss Marcotte has me blocked, but all I have to do is hit [Ctrl][Alt][N] and it takes me to the private browsing screen, in which I am not logged in on Twitter, and I can see what she has posted.
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Killadelphia Do gun buyback programs work?

Tweet by Captain Joseph Busa, commanding officer, 39th Police District. Click to enlarge.

There is an episode of Blue Bloods, a television series about a fictional law enforcement family, “No Questions Asked,” about a gun buyback program, in which a very distinctive, pearl-handled pistol linked to a crime was turned in, in this case by the brother of the criminal. Detective Danny Reagan had to jump through all sorts of hoops to find the criminal, since the buyback program was not supposed to produce any evidence against anyone who sold the firearms. But, in a way, it showed that the only time such a buyback program produced a weapon actually used in a crime was when it was turned in by someone else.

Philly buyback events have yielded 1,000 guns in the last three years. None had been used in crimes.

“It’s political theater,” said Joe Giacalone, a former New York Police Department sergeant-turned-CUNY criminology professor.

by Ryan W. Briggs and Ellie Rushing | Saturday, August 13, 2022

As both shootings and gun sales in Philadelphia rose to unprecedented levels last year, a growing number of residents also turned their firearms over to the city’s Police Department, data show.

In 2021, during 16 gun-buyback events — in which people are typically offered $50 to $200 gift cards for each weapon — 558 handguns and 188 long guns were turned in. That’s a 532% increase over 2019, when just five such events were held, according to police data.

Yet of the more than 1,000 weapons turned in over the last three years, not a single one has been linked to a crime.

Ahhh, the journolism[1]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading of The Philadelphia Inquirer! The article headline states that none of the guns bought back “had been used in crimes,” but the article tells us that none have been linked to crimes. A gun could have been used in a crime, to threaten people, but never actually fired, in which case there would be no expended bullets recovered to test for ballistics which could link a particular weapon to a crime.

The number of buyback events — and media attention surrounding them — has grown in reaction to the city’s escalating gun violence crisis. But experts on the issue say the lackluster statistics show the events are not effective in reducing crime.

“It’s not reaching the area of the community that’s possessing illegal guns and using them,” said Joe Giacalone, a former New York Police Department sergeant-turned-CUNY criminology professor.

“It’s political theater.”

Philadelphia Police Capt. Frank Palumbo, who coordinates with community groups to staff buyback events, acknowledged that police generally do not expect crime guns to be turned in. But he said getting just one gun off the street could still potentially prevent a fatal shooting.

“It tends to be family people, mom-and-pop-type people” attending the events, he said. “It’s people that want to get a gun potentially out of the hands of a toddler that might frequent their homes, or get rid of a gun they don’t use or have the means to secure.”

And there you have it: even the Inky is admitting that these silly programs aren’t targeting the actual criminals. Captain Palumbo tells us that he knows that the bad guys, the ones who expect to use a firearm criminally, aren’t about to give up the tools of their trade.

‘Guns do not belong in the home’

Philadelphia is often credited with launching the first gun-buyback program. In 1968, amid a wave of interest in gun-control regulations nationally, City Council and the police commissioner-turned-mayor, Frank Rizzo, organized a “gun turn in” event, although initially no money was offered for the weapons.

Rizzo noted then that the program was not aimed at nabbing criminals but attracting “good citizens” interested in doing their civic duty to get guns out of circulation.

“Guns do not belong in the home,” Rizzo said. “Many homicides occur because a weapon was handy.”

Mr Rizzo presided over four straight years as mayor of over 400 murders per year, and an average of 349.5 for the four years of his second term.

Whatever the late Mr Rizzo’s views about firearms not belonging in people’s homes, it has become very apparent that Philadelphians have been buying weapons, and obtaining concealed carry permits, at a record pace because they have no confidence that the city and Philadelphia Police Department can or will protect them. The Police Department is seriously undermanned:

Shortages in the Police Department have been well-documented. The force, authorized to have 6,380 officers and nearly 1,000 more civilian staff, has 400 vacancies and hundreds more officers off-duty on injury claims. The department saw 195 uniformed officers retire last year, double from five years prior.

Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw has repeatedly said the department is at its lowest staffing levels in years, hampering its ability to fight crime because it can’t replicate the work of a force that was at least 10% larger several years ago.

That’s a problem in a city that has, over the past two years, seen its highest rates of gun violence in generations. Reports of other crimes, including carjackings and auto thefts, have skyrocketed since the spring of 2020. In the meantime, average police response times jumped 20% in 2021 compared to the year before, according to an Inquirer analysis of department records.

There’s an old saying, “When seconds count, the police are only minutes away.” Well, in short-staffed Philadelphia, the police are, on average, 22 minutes away.

Of course, there were a few guns not bought back in the City of Brotherly Love:

Pregnant woman shot in the head among 15 gun violence victims in Philly in less than 24 hours

The violence occurred over about 21 hours from noon on Friday through 9:30 a.m. Saturday, leaving at least three dead.

by Nick Vadala and Robert Moran | Saturday, August 13, 2022 | Updated: 8;25 PM EDT

A woman seven months pregnant who was shot in the head, a 6-year-old boy grazed by a stray bullet, and four people injured in a drive-by shooting were among at least 15 shooting victims in Philadelphia on Friday and Saturday, police said.

The violence occurred over about 21 hours, from noon on Friday through 9:30 a.m. Saturday, leaving at least three dead. Police reported no arrests.

Actually, it started earlier than that: a 64-year-old woman was stabbed to death, allegedly by a 16-year-old relative, in the early morning hours on Friday.

2626 North Bouvier Street. Click to enlarge.

The shootings happened as gun violence continues to surge in the city, with 338 homicides and 1,149 shooting victims as of Thursday — 3% more than on the same date last year, which ended in a record 562 homicides.

The pregnant woman, said to be in her 20s, remained in extremely critical condition Saturday at Temple University Hospital.

It was shortly after 10 p.m. Friday when at least two people — including one with a powerful rifle — started shooting at her and a 15-year-old boy while they sat in a white Honda on the 2600 block of North Bouvier Street in North Philadelphia, said Inspector D.F. Pace.

The teenager died a short time later, Pace said.

Police found 43 spent shell casings at the crime scene.

At least 43 rounds fired, in a very narrow street, and the woman is still alive?

The 2600 block of North Bouvier Street — really, one of the city’s very narrow, alley-like streets — isn’t exactly the greatest neighborhood in North Philly, adjacent to Strawberry Mansion. Zillow is telling me that 2626 North Bouvier Street sold for $133,000 on March 26, 2022.

The Inquirer article lists three dead from shootings. With the stabbing, I count four. That makes at least 342 murders in the city, and that’s only the early evening on Saturday night. Looks like the bad guys didn’t turn in their weapons for buyback.

References

References
↑1 The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
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“I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” We need to take care of Americans first!

I will start out with full disclosure: I am not a fan of Lexington Herald-Leader columnist Linda Blackford. She’s a liberal writer among a seemingly all-liberal editorial staff at what my best friend used to call the Herald-Liberal. But I have to laugh when a supporter of more government action winds up complaining about the inefficiency of government!

FEMA knows disasters. Why aren’t they doing a better job in Eastern Kentucky?

by Linda Blackford | Friday, August 12, 2022 | 10:48 AM EDT

There’s probably not a lot that Sen. Brandon Smith, R-Hazard, and Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear agree on, politically or otherwise.

My nephew Nate flirting riding with KY National Guard lieutenant during search-and-rescue missions in Breathitt County. Click to enlarge.

But they are united on this — flood victims in Eastern Kentucky are not getting the help they so desperately need from the federal government in the wake of catastrophic flooding on July 28.

As Tessa Duvall wrote in a story on Thursday, “State Sen. Brandon Smith, R-Hazard, said in news release, he has received ‘countless phone calls from desperate eastern Kentucky residents’ outlining FEMA’s ‘alleged inaction, denials and an indication of surprisingly inadequate financial assistance to rebuild their homes and lives.’ “

Beshear has heard the same stories and concluded, “it’s not right.”

Sen. Mitch McConnell also announced Friday that he “spoke personally with President Biden, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Mayorkas, and Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) Administrator Criswell to advocate for increased aid. After hearing concerns from Eastern Kentucky residents and local officials during this week’s visits, Senator McConnell contacted FEMA Administrator Criswell again to encourage expedited assistance for Kentuckians impacted by flooding.”

Sometimes, it’s good to have one of the most powerful politicians in Washington on your side.

LOL! That won’t be good enough for Mrs Blackford and the Herald-Leader not to endorse former state Representative Charles Booker in the November election! The Lexington newspaper always endorses Democrats, and if Mr Booker is running against incumbent Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) rather than Mr McConnell, they also endorsed Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes in 1984, and Amy McGrath Henderson, in 2000, over Senator McConnell. Both lost in huge landslides.

But if we are all on the same side here, what is the problem? FEMA administrators surely have enough experience — many decades — with catastrophic flooding to know that if someone’s house is completely flooded, they aren’t necessarily going to have the documents they need to prove they own it. They must know that people need help immediately, and lots of it. They must understand that $37,900 — the total cap for housing reimbursement — will no longer go very far in rebuilding a house from scratch these days.

And they must understand that if that help is not forthcoming in rebuilding, people will have to leave, further hurting the region.

Surely she can’t be surprised that bureaucrats act like bureaucrats.

Mrs Blackford noted that there’s a hard cap of $37,900 in disaster assistance money, and while that certainly won’t rebuild a house, it doesn’t matter: FEMA agents cannot authorize more money than the law allows. Checking the website for Clayton Mobile Homes in Richmond, $37,900 won’t even buy a decent house trailer. Earlier today I found one mobile home for $50,000, two bedrooms and two bathrooms, and a whopping 820 ft², but now that one is gone.

If you didn’t have good flood insurance, too bad, so sad, but you are stuck to another object by an inclined plane, wrapped helically around an axis. And flood insurance, if you can even get it, is extremely expensive, beyond the means of many of the poorer people living in eastern Kentucky. A lady I know in Irvine had flood insurance, because it was required for her to get a mortgage on the home she bought. Trouble is that the only flood insurance she could afford had a $10,000 deductible, and the March 2021 flood did $6,500 in damage to her home. She spent all of that money for flood insurance, and it did her no good at all. Really, flood insurance is only good if your home is a total loss.

But, most importantly, she mentioned that we have sent billions of dollars in money and equipment to Ukraine, a country surely in need, but a country that is not the United States! The United States has sent Ukraine roughly $9.1 billion so far, and $9.1 billion could provide $100,000 in housing aid to each of 91,000 families in eastern Kentucky, far more than were unhoused by the flooding.

Don’t worry about Ukraine; we need to take care of Americans first!

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Killadelphia Not all murders in Philly are in the combat zone neighborhoods

The Philadelphia Police Department updates its Current Crime Statistics Page only during “normal business hours,” Monday through Friday, so homicides on Friday, Saturday and Sunday are not reported until Monday morning. The City of Brotherly Love — and yes, while I like to use various nicknames for places, using Philly’s nickname is pretty much mocking it these days — had no reported murders on Thursday, leaving the city with 338 homicides, nine more, 2.74% more, than the same date in 2021.

But just because the numbers won’t be officially reported until Monday, we already have one for Friday on the books:

Woman fatally stabbed in South Philadelphia home; 16-year-old relative is person of interest

Police responded to the home on the 2300 block of South 20th Street shortly before 12:30 a.m. Friday.

by Rodrigo Torrejón | Friday, August 12, 2022

A 64-year-old woman was stabbed to death early Friday morning and police said a 16-year-old relative is being treated as a person of interest.

Shortly before 12:30 a.m. Friday, police responded to a report of a stabbing in a home on the 2300 block of South 20th Street. When police arrived, they found the woman with multiple stab and cut wounds to her neck in the second floor hallway of the home, Philadelphia Police Chief Inspector Scott Small told reporters at the scene.

A large kitchen knife with a 10-to-12 inch blade that had blood on it was found feet away from the woman’s head, he said. The woman, whose name has not been released, was pronounced dead by a medic, police said.

The 16-year-old was found with blood on him and cuts to his hands, said Small. He was taken to Jefferson Methodist Hospital and was being treated as a person of interest.

The Inquirer story said that an arrest has been made, but that the police did not say who was in custody. However, Steve Keeley of Fox 29 News tweeted that the 16-year-old family member had been taken into custody.

This was not a typical gang-banger shooting, and, for some reason, it appears that the 16-year-old was trying to kill the owner’s cat, and the elderly woman died trying to save her cat.

The 2300 block of South 20th Street is not a terrible neighborhood. Primarily working-class rowhomes, Google Maps, at least as of September of 2019, does not show any houses with front porches barred in to keep out the bad guys, or steel bars on first floor windows. Zillow shows a guesstimated value of the home in question — yes, I know exactly which home it is — of $183,300, and some homes nearby have recently sold for more than $200,000. An obviously flipped rowhome, just a block further up South 20th Street, sold for $290,000 in January of 2021.

Yeah, most of Philly’s violence is in the combat zones, but not all of it. This could have been a kid who was already nuts, or a delinquent treated leniently by the system, or one hopped on drugs, or even just someone who, for some unknown reason, snapped; the information released to the public doesn’t tell us. But life is cheap in Philadelphia, and being in a decent neighborhood is not perfect protection.

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Does Mark Bailey think that getting raped is really not all that bad?

Twitter is a social medium in which you can find all sorts of unexpected things, and the screen capture of a tweet from Mark Bailey pretty much fits the definition of ‘unexpected.’ I do screen captures just in case the author decides that oops, perhaps he shouldn’t have tweeted that. and deletes it. But with [insert plural slang term for the anus here] like me around, the internet is forever!

There were all sorts of responses, the vast majority of which were expressing incredulity that anyone, anyone! would tweet something which could be read as saying that a woman about to be assaulted or raped would be better off just surrendering and taking whatever happened to her, and I will confess to having added a couple of them myself.

But then I asked myself, what was Mr Bailey really trying to say, so I asked him

You know what? I’ll bite and ask intellectually: what do you believe a woman should do if she is about to be assaulted, sexually or otherwise? Do you believe that it is somehow better that she just accept being beaten or raped (rather) than shoot, and possibly kill, the assailant?

Mr Baily hadn’t responded immediately, which is perfectl;y fine: he might not even be on Twitter at after 10:00 PM on a Thursday night. But I did find this from him as I went to his Twitter bio:

Now this is the first response to my posts that seems to understand my meaning. In New York City, you are persecuted if you take the law into your own hands and defend yourself. Walking around with a gun, opens the door to questions about why are you walking around with a gun?

Well, one thing is clear: New York City, and New York State, do not want people to be able to defend themselves against armed criminal assault, as they tried, fortunately unsuccessfully, in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v Bruen, to defend the laws which mostly deny law-abiding citizens the right to carry concealed weapons. It should be noted that the Manhattan District Attorney, another George Soros funded ‘progressive’ stooge named Alvin Bragg, initially sought to try bodega owned José Alba, 61, for fatally stabbing Austin Simmons, 35, who attacked him after Mr Alba refused to accept short payment from Mr Simmons’ girlfriend for something. Eventually, the District Attorney’s office decided to dismiss the charge:

In the prosecution’s motion to dismiss, Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Sigall said the district attorney’s office would not present the case to a grand jury. “Following an investigation, the People have determined that we cannot prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant was not justified in his use of deadly physical force,” Sigall said in the court filing.

Translation: Mr Bragg wanted to lock up Mr Alba, but knew that no grand jury would indict him, and no petit jury would convict him; Mr Bragg knew that he was looking like a fool, and was trying to cut his losses.

Mr Alba didn’t defend himself by using a firearm, but it certainly brings up Mr Bailey’s second statement: if a New Yorker was carrying a firearm without a permit, and used that firearm to defend himself against an assault, sexual or otherwise, Mr Bragg and his minions might well try to charge him for using potentially deadly force to defend himself.

It was Thursday morning that The New York Times finally noticed the City of Brotherly Love, and published ‘Everybody Is Armed’: As Shootings Soar, Philadelphia Is Awash in Guns: More than 1,400 people have been shot this year in Philadelphia, hundreds of them fatally — a higher toll than in much larger New York or Los Angeles, the day after Mr Bailey’s unfortunate tweet. We have previously noted that Philadelphians are seeking concealed carry permits in record-setting numbers precisely because the bad guys have been on a rampage, killing people in the city at a record breaking pace.

Mr Bailey tweeted:

This all started out as a debate on having guns in public places, and you paranoid people have turned it into a referendum on rape. The premise of the argument originally was whether pulling a gun and trying to kill your rapist, is it worth losing your life if something goes wrong

and:

When all of a sudden, a gun is pulled, anything can happen to either party. The person who shoots could kill the so called rapist, or the rapist could somehow overpower her & use that same gun to kill her.Or she could be arrested & held for trial where she admits killing someone.

In one way, Mr Bailey is correct: if you have to pull out a firearm to defend yourself, it could still go very wrong for you. But Mr Bailey, in trying to make his point, has moved into silliness: while defending yourself against what he called “the so called rapist”, a phrase which certainly sets himself up for more criticism, could go badly for a potential victim, not being able to defend against an assault means getting assaulted. Perhaps he didn’t mean to make it sound that way, but many people, myself included, are reading this as him suggesting that getting assaulted or raped is just not so bad as to be worth risking whatever it is you are risking by defending yourself.

I will notify Mr Bailey, via Twitter, of this article, giving him a reasonable chance to respond.

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Several previously convicted sex offenders arrested in Lexington for parole violations.

We noted, on August 5th, the arrest of previously convicted sex offender William Wehking. It looks like Fayette County is working hard to enforce the laws under which convicted sex offenders must live:

Over a dozen sex offenders in Fayette County arrested for not complying with registry

by Christopher Leach | Wednesday, August 10, 2022 | 1:22 PM EDT | Updated: 3:31 PM EDT

A multi-day operation headed by local and federal law enforcement agencies resulted in the arrests of 13 registered sex offenders in Fayette County who weren’t compliant with the sex offender registry, the Fayette County Sheriff’s Office announced Wednesday.

The sheriff’s office, along with the U.S. Marshals Service and Kentucky State Probation & Parole teamed up to carry out a Fayette County sex offender registration operation. The goal of the operation was to ensure supervised, registered sex offenders in Fayette County were compliant with the terms of their probation/parole and applicable laws.

The operation took place on July 26 and 27, according to the sheriff’s office. The coalition checked 78 sex offenders, 57 of which were deemed compliant, the sheriff’s office said. Of the remaining 21, eight were given sanctions and 13 were arrested for violating parole.

Martese Warner, photo by Fayette County Detention Center, and is a public record.

One of the individuals arrested, Martese Warner, 31, was also charged with trafficking in marijuana, possession of a firearm by a convicted felon and possession of drug paraphernalia.

As of Wednesday morning, all of the 13 suspects arrested were still in custody, according to Fayette County Sheriff Kathy Witt.

“It is my hope that as we move forward that these 13 will have their parole and/or their probation, whichever one it is, rescinded or revoked, and it is my hope that they will have to serve out the rest of their sentence while incarcerated,” Witt said.

As always, the Lexington Herald-Leader chose not to include an offender’s mugshot, but the notion that doing so harms people who may, in the future, be acquitted, should not hold here: these people are all previously convicted sex offenders!

The U.S. marshals said that during the operation they seized 21 cell phones that were unreported or contained violations, three hard drives, two laptops, two “sexual devices/aids,” one knife, one hatchet, one loaded firearm, one box of 9 mm ammunition, 370.3 grams of marijuana, drug paraphernalia, two digital scales, and $700.

Jason Aldridge, photo by Fayette County Detention Center, and is a public record.

Unfortunately, the newspaper named only one of the offenders, and the information in the last quoted paragraph, while specific about what evidence was seized, tells us nothing about from how many of the arrested individuals it was taken. The WLEX-TV Channel 18 story showed some of the offenders listed: Jason Aldridge, George Cady, Likuan Clark, Justin Cook, and Kenneth Cook. All are charged with parole violation (technical violation), with no bond amount listed. Like Sheriff Witt stated, they should have their parole revoked and be kept behind bars until the very last day of their sentences.

George Cady, photo by Fayette County Detention Center, and is a public record.

Likuan Clark, photo by Fayette County Detention Center, and is a public record.

Justin Cook, photo by Fayette County Detention Center, and is a public record.

Kenneth Cook, photo by Fayette County Detention Center, and is a public record.