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What George Soros has inflicted on America

This site has been critical of the George Soros-sponsored District Attorney of Philadelphia, the odious Larry Krasner, many times, but Mr Krasner is hardly the only DA candidate who has been the recipent of Mr Soros’ largesse. George Gascón, who ran for District Attorney of Los Angeles County, received $2,250,000 from Mr Soros and his Open Society Foundations.

So, what did Los Angeles County gain from having Mr Gascón as District Attorney? From Le*gal In*sur*rec*tion:

    L.A. DA Gascón Allows Adult Child Molester to be Housed in Juvenile Detention

    James Tubbs, who committed the crime in 2014 when he was 17, only identified as a woman after they took him into custody so he’ll be housed with the females but supposedly in isolation. He also won’t have to register as a sex offender.

    Posted by Mary Chastain | Friday, January 28, 2022 | 11:00 AM

    James Tubbs, November 11, 2021. If Mr Tubbs identified as female, why was he wearing a wispy, can’t-grow-a-real beard at the time of his arrest? Click to enlarge.

    Superior Court Judge Mario Barrera unleashed his anger at progressive Lose Angeles District Attorney George Gascón for not prosecuting a child molester as an adult.

    James Tubbs admitted he sexually assaulted a 10-year-old girl in a restroom at a Denny’s in 2014. He was two weeks away from turning 18.

    Authorities did not arrest and charge Tubbs for the crime until January 2021. He kept busy, though:

    In the interim, she had been arrested for battery, drug possession and probation violations in Idaho and Washington and convicted of assault with a deadly weapon in Kern County, according to Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department officials. She was also arrested on suspicion of sexually assaulting a minor but wasn’t prosecuted for the alleged offense, according to court records.

Note that the Los Angeles Times used the feminine pronouns to refer to Mr Tubbs, but neither Le*gal In*sur*rec*tion nor The First Street Journal go along with that stupidity; we simply do not change the direct quotations from others.

    James now goes by “Hannah.” But prosecutors claim he did not identify as a transgender until they took him into custody.

    Tubbs knows how to play the system. Gascón has refused to prosecute children as adults.

    Even though Tubbs is now 26 Gascón refused to transfer the crime to adult court:

There’s more at the original, but one thing is clear: Mr Tubbs will not be punished in any way as severely as he injured his victim.

With just two years to serve, Mr Tubbs will be back out, on the streets, shortly. Deputy District Attorney Jon Hatami noted that:

    There was evidence presented at the juvenile proceedings which showed that Tubbs sexually assaulted two young girls in different incidents in the past. The child victims will suffer lifelong trauma. Tubbs also has prior violent convictions and conduct as an adult.

Mr Tubbs will not have to register as a sex offender, and he will have no probation or parole period through which he has to report and be monitored once he is released. He will be, in effect, free and clear. He will go back to jail only after he has committed another crime, quite probably another sexual assault on another minor victim. Some other young girl will have to be sacrificed to whatever abuse Mr Tubbs subjects her to get this cretin off the streets for any serious time. When that happens, will Mr Gascón be held accountable for releasing Mr Tubbs back onto a mostly unaware society?

This is what George Soros has inflicted on our society, and this is that for which the #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 have voted. The New York Post noted that Mr Soros put $1,000,000 into the campaign of new New York County — that’s Manhattan — District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who has decided that he will only prosecute violent offenses.

This is what the current stage of American leftism has wrought. The District Attorney of Los Angeles County takes the word of a (poorly) bearded 26-year-old man male that he is a woman, and treats him like he actually is one. He then decides that this defendant, who was two weeks shy of his 18th birthday, should be treated as a juvenile offender, and sentenced to not-very-much, so that he can get out quickly and do it again.

No one in his right mind would ever take the decisions that Messrs Bragg, Krasner and Gascón have taken, but there you have it, they did. Still, they are just three men; the real out-of-their-minds decisions were taken by the voters who elected them in the first place, because none of these men hid who they were; they all told the voters what they would do.

That the criminal class would vote for people who would not punish crimes is a given, but the criminal class are not large enough to sway elections. No, these men were elected by the guilty white liberals, who vote for the platitudes of the #woke and the far left, but who are well-to-do enough that they don’t really feel the impact of increased crime in their cities. The liberals in Chestnut Hill and Rittenhouse Square might hear about the murder totals in Philadelphia, but they don’t see the blood in the streets in Kensington or Strawberry Mansion, so they can vote for someone like Larry Krasner, feel good about their liberal bona fides, tut-tut when someone like Samuel Collington or Samantha Maag gets murdered, but never feel the impacts of crime themselves. And they’ll never, ever dream that they, through their votes, are responsible for the chaos in their cities.

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.
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What good are gun control laws when Larry Krasner won’t enforce them? The 'racial justice' advocate doesn't like locking up criminals

Sometimes even the innocuous jargon used in government documents can tell a large truth, From the Philadelphia City Council’s 100 Shooting Review Committee Report:

There appears to be a trend in the criminal justice system where gun cases are treated more leniently than in earlier years. It is particularly concerning that the reoffending rate for another gun offense during a VUFA (Violations of Uniform Firearm Act) open case has increased, when the bail posting percentages have increased and overall sentences have become lighter. The current analysis was limited to arrested offenders; it is important to also take into account the network of criminals; they communicate. Criminals see and hear from their peers.[i]

While the office of the George Soros-funded District Attorney, Larry Krasner, did participate in the committee and its findings and recommendations, the document noted that “all of these recommendations are not unanimous,[ii] a rather curious grammatical construct, which I think means that none of the recommendations was unanimous. It’s difficult to believe that Mr Krasner and his stooges would have agreed to that finding. Specifically, the quote is from the section entitled “Last 100 Shooting Data Analysis: Analysis Result by PPD (Philadelphia Police Department)”, so the District Attorney and his office would very much not like that point.

Comprehensive gun violence strategies should have equally balanced elements of enforcement, intervention, and prevention. As for enforcement, classical deterrence theory suggests three elements for deterrence: severity, swiftness, and certainty. Enhanced sentencing will not be the sole solution; however, being lenient against gun crimes at the time of the gun violence crisis should perhaps be scrutinized. Swiftness of the criminal justice system has always been a limitation to deterrence, but court closures during the pandemic as well as increasing number of gun cases coming in (an average of 7 VUFA arrests per day in 2021) will only aggravate this, unless dedicated and increased resources are allocated. Simply increasing the frequency of stops in hopes for strengthening the (perceived) certainly of arrests is not the solution either. Deterring illegal firearm possessions should be holistically addressed by implementing changes in policing, prosecution, and courts, as discussed in the recommendation section of this report.[iii]

Yeah, I’m pretty sure that the DA’s office won’t like that!

The Police Department put together a graphic which showed just what the shooting victims and alleged shooters were like, and it isn’t pretty.[iv] The chart specifically excluded those charges the District Attorney chose not to pursue, and previous charges were limited to the year 2000 and more recently.

Note the obvious: two thirds of the shooting victims had criminal records, most with violent felony records, most with prior firearms charges. The majority of the arrested shooters had violent felony records, had prior firearms charges, and PWID – possession of drugs with the intent to distribute – charges.

These are people who do not obey gun control laws, these are people to whom firearms are simply the tools of their trade, and who are going to carry weapons because, to them, they need those weapons. That most have prior criminal records demonstrates what ought to be obvious to anyone with any common sense: that their actions are illegal doesn’t bother them in the slightest, other than the possibility of getting caught.

There is another graph, on page 21[v] of the report: since District Attorney Krasner took office, the percentage of firearms charges resulting in convictions has dramatically decreased. In Mr Krasner’s first year in office, 2018, 57% of VUFA only arrests resulted in convictions, with 35% having the charges dismissed. Those trend lines crossed the following year, with a larger percentage of charges dismissed, 47%, than resulting in convictions, 43%, and only got worse in 2020 and 2021, 49%/42%, and 62%/36% respectively. In their attempts to get illegal firearm possessions off the streets, the Philadelphia Police Department increased the number of VUFA arrests each year, and each year Mr Krasner’s office let the (alleged) malefactors off the hook in increasing numbers.

 

Of course, the analysis by the District Attorney’s Office (DAO) didn’t look at it the same way at all.  The DAO’s opening statement was:

The urgency of Philadelphia’s crisis of fatal and non-fatal shootings will not be met by looking away from shootings. As noted above, City Council has led a valuable “100 Shooter Review,” a title that makes clear what we already know: that shootings are the primary issue. Our efforts must be focused on preventing shootings and holding people who commit shootings accountable, and we should not accept arrests for gun possession as a substitute.[vi]

This is very much in line with Mr Krasner’s statement:

This office believes that reform is necessary to focus on the most serious and most violent crime, so that people can be properly held accountable for doing things that are violent, that are vicious, and that tear apart society. We cannot continue to waste resources and time on things that matter less than the truly terrible crisis that we are facing.[vii]

That sounds fairly typical for a ‘social justice’ and ‘racial justice’ warrior, someone more concerned with keeping people out of jail than locking up the bad guys.

Gun possession arrests that involve no violent acts present a secondary and important frontier in curbing gun violence, but must be targeted to distinguish between drivers of gun violence who possess firearms illegally and otherwise law-abiding people who are not involved in gun violence. On the one hand, the cases of people charged with 6105[viii] (prohibited person in possession of a firearm) are carefully scrutinized to do individual justice, which will usually look like vigorous prosecution. On the other hand, another criminal charge that applies to people who have no felony conviction (carrying a gun in Philadelphia without having obtained a permit in Philadelphia) is only a felony in Philadelphia. The exact same offense in every other county in Pennsylvania (carrying a firearm without a permit to carry) is only a misdemeanor offense.[ix]

I am one who believes that the Second Amendment means what it says, that the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, and that requiring a permit to carry a weapon ought to be considered wholly unconstitutional. It is, however, a statement wholly at odds with the Democratic Party’s insistence on gun control legislation.

As for ‘racial justice,’ there isn’t much such justice by the demographics:

Offender and victim demographics resemble each other: for the arrested shooters, 94% were male, 95% were people of color (74% Black Male), and the peak age was in late adolescence and young adulthood (18-30 years old). Similarly, for victims, 86.5% were male, 88.5% were people of color (61.5% Black Male), and the peak age was in young adulthood to mid-thirties (21-35 years old).[x]

It is the black population, primarily young black males, who are both the shooters and the victims. In Mr Krasner’s zeal to establish racial justice in the City of Brotherly Love, those who are paying the price for that are primarily black people.

“The role of the District Attorney’s Office is to vigorously, justly, and accurately prosecute people who commit serious and violent crimes,” the DAO wrote.[xi] No, the role of the District Attorney’s Office should be to vigorously, justly, and accurately prosecute people who commit all crimes, not just the ones a particular person believes to be serious. At the point at which the District Attorney and his minions decide that certain crimes are not serious, and should not be prosecuted, they have assumed the function of the state legislature, and declared certain crimes, determined through the constitutional process of legislation and gubernatorial assent, to not be crimes at all.

 

It’s actually pretty simple: even if someone has no previous record, and is committing only the crime of possessing a firearm without a license, 18 Pa.C.S. § 6106, he is knowingly committing a felony, and he must have a reason for that, normally not a very good one. By not prosecuting such people, Mr Krasner and his minions are allowing them to not have criminal records, which means that when they do shoot someone, they’ll have no priors.

As we have previously noted, the Philadelphia Police have charged Steven Thompson, who shot and killed a man trying to steal the catalytic converter from his car, with a firearms violation. I guess that we’ll see if Mr Krasner’s office will prosecute Mr Thompson for ridding the city of yet another criminal.

 

There’s a lot more to the report than I have included here, and much of it is liberal pablum, from the Defender Association of Philadelphia, a group of defense attorneys who represent the indigent and who want to get the accused off, and from the Department of Public Health, which sees the shootings and killings as a public health situation rather than what they actually are, crimes committed by criminals. Access to the document, 196 pages in the .pdf file, is free at this link.

The simplest way to reduce crime is to convict and lock up actual criminals when you catch them; Mr Krasner and his stooges don’t like doing that, and they have helped produce a Philadelphia which saw 353 homicides in 2018, Mr Krasner’s first year in office, an increase of 38 killings, up 12.06% from the previous year, followed by 356 in 2019, then 499, a 30.17% jump, in 2020, just one short of the all-time record of 500 set in the crack cocaine wars of 1990, and finally 562, a 12.63% increase in 2021. As of 11:59 PM EST on Thursday, January 27th, the city has seen 39 people bleeding out their life’s blood in the cold, mean streets.

How many of those people would be alive today if Mr Krasner and his office had done the job that they were supposed to do, actually prosecute criminals, rather than deciding that some crimes were just not serious and turned people actually in custody loose?

We can’t know that, but we do know that Samuel Collington and Philadelphia Police Corporal James O’Connor IV would still be with us.
______________________________________

[i] – 100 Shooting Review Committee Report, page 17 of the document, page 19 of the .pdf file.
[ii] – ibid, page 9 of the document, page 11 of the .pdf file.
[iii] – ibid, page 17 of the document, page 19 of the .pdf file.
[iv] – I was unable to copy the internal chart, and had to reproduce it via Microsoft Excel.
[v]  – op cit, page 21 of the document, page 23 of the .pdf file.
[vi] – ibid, page 30 of the document, page 32 of the .pdf file.
[vii] – Original citation: “‘A terrible crisis’: Krasner discusses Philly’s gun violence after officer’s son gunned down”, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Monday, January 24, 2022.
[viii] – There are two main categories of illegal gun possession cases in Philadelphia: Possession of a firearm by a person who has been prohibited from carrying gun due to a past serious conviction or other prohibition (18 Pa.C.S. § 6105), and possession of a firearm without a license (18 Pa.C.S. § 6106). The former is generally viewed as the most serious illegal gun possession statute, while the latter is generally viewed as less serious than possession by a prohibited person. Both are non-violent offenses only related to illegal possession of a gun. Footnote copied from footnote 16 on page 31 of the document, page 33 of the .pdf file.
[ix] – op cit, page 30-31 of the document, page 32-33 of the .pdf file.
[x] – ibid, page 20 of the document, page 22 of the .pdf file.
[xi] – ibid, page 31 of the document, page 33 of the .pdf file.

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The Lexington Herald-Leader and journalistic ethics

In The First Street Journal, I frequently refer to journolism. 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.

The McClatchy Mugshot Policy states:

Publishing mugshots of arrestees has been shown to have lasting effects on both the people photographed and marginalized communities. The permanence of the internet can mean those arrested but not convicted of a crime have the photograph attached to their names forever. Beyond the personal impact, inappropriate publication of mugshots disproportionately harms people of color and those with mental illness. In fact, some police departments have started moving away from taking/releasing mugshots as a routine part of their procedures.

To address these concerns, McClatchy will not publish crime mugshots — online, or in print, from any newsroom or content-producing team — unless approved by an editor. To be clear, this means that in addition to photos accompanying text stories, McClatchy will not publish “Most wanted” or “Mugshot galleries” in slide-show, video or print.

Any exception to this policy must be approved by an editor. Editors considering an exception should ask:

  • Is there an urgent threat to the community?
  • Is this person a public official or the suspect in a hate crime?
  • Is this a serial killer suspect or a high-profile crime?

If an exception is made, editors will need to take an additional step with the Pub Center to confirm publication by making a note in the ‘package notes‘ field in Sluglife.

So, if a rape suspect was arrested in Madison County, someone who cannot be an urgent threat to the community, since he’s now in custody, someone who isn’t a public official or suspect in a hate crime, a serial killer or suspect in a high-profile crime, One would assume that the Lexington Herald-Leader wouldn’t publish his picture, right?

    Screenshot from Lexington Herald-Leader

    Kentucky State Police assists Madison County Sheriff’s Office with arrest of rape suspect

    by Christopher Leach | Thursday, January 27, 2022 | 7:23 AM EST

    Troopers with Kentucky State Police in Estill County arrested a suspect accused of sexual assaulting a minor on Tuesday, according to the Madison County Sheriff’s Office.

    Burl Hollon, of Waco, was charged with two counts of rape, two counts of sodomy and two counts of sexual abuse. He is being lodged at the Madison County Detention Center.

    No other details have been released about Hollon’s case. The sheriff’s office conducted the investigation while KSP made the arrest.

The mugshot there? That’s a screenshot taken from the Herald-Leader original, and it’s most certainly a police mugshot, taken from the Madison County Sheriff’s Facebook page.

Now, I have no sympathy for the accused, but not yet convicted, Mr Hollen. The Facebook page states that he has been accused of:

  • Rape, 1st Degree – Victim <12 years of age
  • Rape, 2nd Degree – No Force
  • Sodomy, 1st Degree – Victim <12 years of age
  • Sodomy, 2nd Degree
  • Sexual Abuse, 1st Degree – Victim U/12 years
  • Sexual Abuse, 3rd Degree

Just the first charge:

    KRS § 510.040. Rape in the first degree.
    (1) A person is guilty of rape in the first degree when:
    (a) He engages in sexual intercourse with another person by forcible compulsion; or
    (b) He engages in sexual intercourse with another person who is incapable of consent because he:
    1. Is physically helpless; or
    2. Is less than twelve (12) years old.
    (2) Rape in the first degree is a Class B felony unless the victim is under twelve (12) years old or receives a serious physical injury in which case it is a Class A felony.

Class A felonies in the Bluegrass State can result in prison sentences of 20 to 50 years, or life imprisonment.

If convicted, Mr Hollen should receive the maximum sentence allowable under the law; the only way he should ever leave prison is in a hearse.

But I noticed, as I have before, that the Herald-Leader, which very much eschews publishing the mugshots of photos of black persons accused of, or even convicted of, serious crimes, certainly seems less reticent when it comes to publishing the photos of white suspects.

According to the Lexington Police Department’s shootings investigations page, there have been nine non-fatal shootings in the city . . . and eight of the victims have been black. In 2021, with 134 shootings reported, there were 20 victims who are white, and 12 more listed as Hispanic, which leaves 102 victims listed as black. That’s 76.12%, in a city in which just 14.2% of the population are black. The lead McClatchy newspaper, the Sacramento Bee, stated that publishing mugshots and crime videos, “disproportionately harms people of color and those with mental illness, while also perpetuating stereotypes about who commits crime in our community.”

So what are the editors of the Herald-Leader doing? Whether intentionally or otherwise, the paper’s coverage of crime and their choices in which photos to use appear to be aimed at persuading readers that the perpetrators of crimes in the region are primarily white. While in the eastern Kentucky areas of the Herald-Leader’s circulation area, that’s probably true, given that the non-white percentage of the population in that area is very low, but when you get to the city of Lexington, the numbers say that no, that’s not the case.

To not “perpetuat(e) stereotypes”, the newspaper would print no mugshots at all; printing a disproportionate percentage of mugshots in which the accused are white is an active attempt to not just avoid stereotypes, but to skew the public’s perception in an inaccurate direction.

Part of the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics states:

    Ethical journalism should be accurate and fair. Journalists should be honest and courageous in gathering, reporting and interpreting information.

  • Never deliberately distort facts or context, including visual information. Clearly label illustrations and re-enactments.

What the editors of the Herald-Leader are doing is distorting the facts, using visual information.

This is journolism, not journalism, this is the skewing of information to produce a false impression. If the editors are aware of what is being done in the newspaper and website they control, they are deliberately lying to their readers; if the editors are somehow not aware of what they have been doing, then they are not competent in doing their jobs, and need to be replaced.

It’s easy enough to just tell the truth. If the editors are concerned that publishing mugshots “disproportionately harms people of color,” then they should stop publishing all mugshots. In that manner, while they would not be telling the whole truth, they would not be distorting the truth. But what they have been doing recently is a distortion of the truth, and rotten journalism.

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The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Will Bunch is horrified that some Democrats want to actually fight crime!

Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer’s hard, hard left columnist, really hates the police and radical things like, oh, people having to obey the law!

You can already see it: the distinguished Mr Bunch is more worried about “mass incarceration”, “wrongful convictions,” and “police brutality” than he is about actual crime in the streets. The hysterical, boldfaced parts of his comments? Those are in Mr Bunch’s original; I did not add them.

Have there been brutality cases and wrongful convictions? Yup, sure have; no system of law enforcement is now, or ever will be, perfect. But those cases are far, far, far fewer than criminal acts on the streets. Mass incarceration? No; the problem there is that not enough people have been incarcerated! As we noted yesterday, there have been a lot of cases in which far more serious crimes have been committed by men who could, and should, have been behind bars for less serious crimes, but crimes, though less serious than rape or murder, were still treated too leniently.

Has Mr Bunch forgotten about Latif Williams, who (allegedly) murdered Samuel Collington near Temple University, in a botched carjacking? He had been released by a soft-headed judge on an unsecured bond, but could have been in custody when Mr Collington was killed, a crime which incensed the Inquirer so much that they published Mr Williams’ name, even though he is a juvenile?

Has Mr Bunch forgotten about Hasan Elliot, whom District Attorney let slide on probation violations and drug charges, before he killed a Philadelphia Police Corporal?

Oh, wait, I’m sorry: there is little evidence that Mr Bunch would be all that upset about a police officer being killed.

    That both political parties tripped over each other in racing to hire more and more cops, lengthen prison sentences, and wage an over-the-top “war on drugs” made it all the more stunning in the spring of 2020 when millions of Americans took to the streets after the police murder of George Floyd to demand radical change. For a remarkable — and remarkably brief — moment, most Democrats rushed to embrace a new world order in which cops wouldn’t just operate under stricter rules but policing itself would be downsized in favor of social services.

    The poster child of this pivoting ideology was arguably the then-Democratic nominee for president, Joe Biden. He was a key architect of the 1994 federal crime bill that put a U.S. stamp of approval on mass incarceration, but when taking office in 2021, President Biden promised “to root out systemic racism in our criminal justice system and to enact police reform in George Floyd’s name.”

    But the echo of 2020′s bold promises had barely died down when the murder rate spiked across much of America, driven heavily, experts increasingly believe, by rage and ennui over the endless COVID-19 pandemic. Terrified by fear that the activists’ chants of “defund the police” would cost their party the 2020 and 2021 elections, top Democrats are now scurrying back to the old playbook by calling for more cops.

Does anyone think that maybe, just maybe, the public actually want more cops on the street, more police protection, when Philadelphia fell just one murder short of its all-time record in 2020, the year of the summer of riots and hate, and then completely blew that record out of the water in 2021? Might it just be possible that the public, in Pennsylvania, might be a bit more concerned now that the City of Brotherly Love is slightly ahead of the homicide pace it set last year?

    Pennsylvania’s Democratic candidate for governor, Attorney General Josh Shapiro is leading the way. The veteran Montgomery County politician needed no big push to stand with officers — the controversial Philadelphia Lodge of the Fraternal Order of Police donated $25,000 to Shapiro’s 2020 AG campaign — and the lack of a primary challenger has allowed him to drift to the center-right, months before the general election.

    “We need more police … more police with time to form relationships in the community that they serve,” Shapiro said last month in West Philadelphia. Although Shapiro tempers his remarks with a call for community policing and calls for other services besides law enforcement, his emphasis on more cops — including a plan for hiring bonuses of $6,000 for new recruits — have grabbed headlines early in his campaign.

There’s more of Mr Bunch’s cry of outrage at the original, but Josh Shapiro has already won a statewide election, and, one would presume, has at least some idea what Pennsylvania’s voters might want. The Attorney General even cut District Attorney Krasner out of the loop with significant gun and drug trafficking charges, at least in part because he thought that Mr Krasner wouldn’t prosecute the (alleged) malefactors seriously.

    Look, no one is disputing that the increase in murders — including a record in Philadelphia last year, with horrific headlines about little kids struck by stray bullets or the Asian woman pushed in front of a New York subway train — demands full and prompt attention from our political leaders. But is there any evidence that hiring more cops is the answer? Especially when many high-profile killings — involving domestic violence or road rage — happen in places and ways that defy traditional police methods.

Here is where Mr Bunch really veers into the weeds. The high-profile cases might not be affected, but the vast majority of murders, in Philadelphia, in Chicago, in St Louis, are low-profile, so low-profile that they rarely make the pages of Mr Bunch’s newspaper, the killings of the young black males who are blowing each other away with such alarming frequency. Those are the murders which would be reduced if lower-level crimes were treated seriously, if the gang-bangers who could have been locked up for lesser crimes had been locked up, had been treated seriously.

Of course, as I’ve said before, black lives don’t really matter to The Philadelphia Inquirer. And the price for doing things the way that Will Bunch wants would be measured in the blood in the city’s mean streets.

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How To Navigate a Divorce

No one gets married with the intention of getting divorced later on. However, a large percentage of marriages end in divorce, and you may not know what to do if you find yourself in this unfortunate situation. A divorce can get nasty, especially if there are children involved. Use these three tips to navigate the divorce process as smoothly as possible.

Hire a Lawyer

You may try to avoid incurring the additional expense of a lawyer if your divorce is friendly. Unfortunately, many divorces are far from amicable. If you find yourself in the middle of a contested divorce Tampa, it is time to hire a legal representative to fight for your best interests. He or she can also help you navigate the legal processes associated with divorce.

Know What You Want

If your divorce is not amicable, it can be tempting to refuse to comply with your former spouse’s requests for asset division. However, these negative feelings can drag out the divorce process and make it harder for everyone involved. You need to be willing to compromise if you want the process to be over quickly. It may help to make a list of which assets you want to keep, which ones are negotiable and which ones you don’t care about.  

Develop a Custody Arrangement

If you and your ex have kids together, the divorce process can get even messier. It is important to learn how to co-parent effectively, but that probably won’t happen for at least a few years. The best thing you can do after a fresh divorce is keep your negative feelings to yourself and focus on your kids. Regardless of how you feel about your former spouse, he or she is still the other parent to your children. Your kids will likely still want to spend plenty of quality time with your ex. You should be supportive and come up with a custody arrangement that everyone involved is satisfied with.

Divorce is not an easy process for anyone involved. Most people want to get the process over with as quickly as possible so that they can resume their normal lifestyles. These three tips won’t take away the pain that comes with filing for divorce, but they can help the process flow more smoothly. Use these tips so that you can get the divorce finalized quickly and start the healing process so that you can have a better life.

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The incomparable genius of Larry Krasner! Albert Einstein supposedly said, "The definition of a fool is someone who does the same thing over and over again expecting different results."

Murder is not normally an entry-level crime. When someone goes out armed and shoots someone else, the odds are very high that the shooter previously had ‘encounters’ with the police, and often a significant rap sheet.

Rudy Giuliani knew this, and that’s why, as Mayor of New York City, he instituted what’s known as ‘broken windows policing,’ cracking down on the minor crimes, to try to get the little guys on the path to becoming bad guys straightened out before they became major bad guys, and to end the social norms that allow crime. If one window is broken out in a building, and left unrepaired, the theory states that the rest will soon be broken as well, because it becomes acceptable for punks to throw rocks to break out the other windows.

Well, George Doros-funded, cop-hating District Attorney Larry Krasner (D-Philadelphia) doesn’t believe in that!

    ‘A terrible crisis’: Krasner discusses Philly’s gun violence after officer’s son gunned down

    Homicides in the city have already hit 38 this year, two more than at the same time last year, Krasner said. “This is truly a terrible crisis that we are suffering through,” he said.

    by Mensah M Dean | Monday, January 24, 2022

    The son of a Philadelphia police officer was shot and killed early Monday morning in North Philadelphia, the 38th homicide already this month and one reflecting “a terrible crisis” for the city, District Attorney Larry Krasner said.

    The 23-year-old man, whom police identified as Hyram Hill, was shot in the 1400 block of West Allegheny Avenue at 4:38 a.m. in what appeared to be a robbery. Paramedics rushed him to nearby Temple University Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 5:01 a.m.

    Hill had been shot multiple times in his left chest, right arm, abdomen and back, police said Monday afternoon. In the morning, Joanne Pescatore, Krasner’s newly appointed supervisor of the Homicide and Non-Fatal Shooting Unit, said he had been shot nine times. . . . .

    “This is a slight increase from terrible to terrible,” Krasner said. “That’s where we are with homicides. This is truly a terrible crisis that we are suffering through.”

    The district attorney said the gun-violence toll ― which accounted for the majority of 562 homicides last year, a record ― has convinced him that his office should focus on such violent crimes rather than lesser crimes such as prostitution and marijuana possession.

    “This office believes that reform is necessary to focus on the most serious and most violent crime, so that people can be properly held accountable for doing things that are violent, that are vicious, and that tear apart society,” he said. “We cannot continue to waste resources and time on things that matter less than the truly terrible crisis that we are facing.”

Really? Perhaps, just perhaps, if law enforcement, from the police through the prosecutor, would treat the crimes that “matter less” than homicide seriously, people like the cretin who gunned down Hyram Hill would have been behind bars Monday morning, not out robbing someone, and not putting nine bullets into an apparently innocent victim.

Remember Cody Allen Arnett, the multiply-convicted felon who was let out early by the Kentucky state Parole Board, who then went out and forcibly raped a Georgetown College coed? Now he has a life sentence, but if he’d been kept behind bars when he should have been, if he hadn’t been treated leniently, his victim would never have been raped.

Remember Vincent Pinkney, who could have been behind bars, if he had been treated seriously, and instead was out on the street to murder a Columbia graduate student? How about Latif Williams, who (allegedly) murdered Samuel Collington near Temple University, in a botched carjacking? He had been released by a soft-headed judge on an unsecured bond, but could have been in custody when Mr Collington was killed.

Then there was Hasan Elliot, 21, a known gang-banger, whom Mr Krasner treated leniently:

  • 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 meet 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, and prosecutors dropped those charges against him.

On Friday, March 13, 2020, Mr Elliot shot and killed Philadelphia Police Corporal James O’Connor IV. Had Mr Krasner’s office treated Mr Elliot seriously, he would have been behind bars on that Friday the 13th, and Corporal O’Connor would still be alive.

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

The Philadelphia Police saw that as well, and a group of police officers blocked the entrance to the emergency room at Temple University Hospital to deny Mr Krasner and his entourage entrance to visit Corporal O’Connor’s family.

Yet Mr Krasner, who just hates locking up the bad guys, wants to continue with the same policies which have contribute to Philadelphia’s huge homicide rate. Philadelphia’s daily average inmate population was 6,409 when Mr Krasner took office, and was down to 4,849 on August 31, 2019. As of January 23, 2022, the jail population was even lower, 4,519 inmates. Mr Krasner sees this as a good thing; I see it as 2,000 more punks out on the street victimizing law-abiding people.

It ought to be obvious even to the densest person: a criminal who is in jail is not out on the streets committing more crimes. But District Attorney Krasner would leave the lower-level bad guys out, walking around free when he could have them behind bars, and then be shocked, shocked! when one of them blows away the son of a police officer.

An intelligent man, which Mr Krasner purports to be, ought to have learned from what treating Hasan Elliot leniently did, and changed his policies accordingly; a stupid man would have just continued with the failed policies of his own, and others, that have let violent crime fester and grow.

There’s really only one conclusion: Larry Krasner is one stupid man!

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“This can’t possibly be rewarding in any way. I can’t see how anyone could feel good about this.”

We have written previously about the University of Pennsylvania’s ‘transgender’ women’s swimmer, Will Thomas, who goes by the name “Lia.”[1]In accordance with The First Street Journal’s Stylebook, the ‘transgendered’ are referred to by their birth names, and using the honorifics and pronouns appropriate to their … Continue reading Now the New York Post has printed a story from an unnamed teammate of Mr Thomas’:

That part is incorrect: Mr Thomas, was according to the University of Pennsylvania’s athletic department’s swimming and diving 2018-19 team roster, a sophomore member of the men’s team. He was “Second-team All-Ivy in the 500 free, 1,000 free, and 1,650 free after reaching the ‘A’ final of the Ivy League Championships and finishing second overall in each of the events.” During the 2019-20 season, he “won the 500 free against Villanova (Nov. 15).” That is competitive, if not exactly dominant.

    The anonymous female swimmer gave an interview to the Washington Examiner on Sunday — a day after Thomas, 22, racked up two more wins at a meet against Ivy League rival Harvard University.

    She railed against the NCAA for not acknowledging Thomas had a distinct advantage and accused the board of governors of “not protecting women’s rights.”

    “Women are now third-class citizens,” the swimmer told the outlet.

    “Lia was not even close to being competitive as a man in the 50 and the 100 [freestyle events]. But just because Lia is biologically a man, [Lia] is just naturally better than many females in the 50 and the 100 or anything that [Lia] wasn’t good at as a man.”

UPenn Women’s Swim Team, via Instagram. It isn’t difficult to pick out the one man male in a women’s bikini top. Click to enlarge.

Mr Thomas’ times have been gradually slowing, so much so that there have been suspicions that he has slowed down deliberately, still winning, but by much smaller margins.

But there’s an obvious question here: who is this unidentified female teammate? There are a couple dozen real women on the UPenn team, and it could have been any of them, but I’ve noticed a pattern here: the stories are all broken by the same two outlets, the Washington Examiner, a conservative website, and OutKick. OutKick said:

    While University of Pennsylvania transgender swimmer Lia Thomas, who spent three years at the Ivy League school swimming as a male, has been busy smashing female pool records, friction has been building within the team, according to a Penn female swimmer who said she feared for her ability to find employment after graduating from college for sharing her honest opinion about a transgender teammate. For that reason, OutKick is granting her anonymity to speak out.

Those are reasonable concerns for the teammate, but I have to wonder: has it always been the same teammate who has been the source for these stories? This has sort of jumped out at me as I have read these stories.

But one part of the New York Post story cited above really jumped out at me, a quote from this anonymous woman, who said, “This can’t possibly be rewarding in any way. I can’t see how anyone could feel good about this.”

That’s absolutely right: how does Mr Thomas, who grew up male, who competed athletically with men, doing well and occasionally winning at the collegiate level, justify in his own mind beating a bunch of real girls? How does Mr Thomas, in his tremendous concern to be accepted as a woman and not a male, justify competing in events which only serve to point out the differences between him and biological women? I have asked that second question before, and no one has been able to give me an answer.

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↑1 In accordance with The First Street Journal’s Stylebook, the ‘transgendered’ are referred to by their birth names, and using the honorifics and pronouns appropriate to their biological sex, not their imagined “gender.” When using Twitter to publicize my stories, I have sometimes had to refer to him as ‘Lia’ to avoid getting banned for ‘deadnaming’ or ‘misgendering’.
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To our credentialed media, truth is racist! And they just can't handle the truth!

As always, I checked the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page on Monday morning, and it tells me that, as of 11:59 PM EST on Sunday, January 23, 2022, 37 souls had been sent untimely to their eternal rewards. IT also tells me that ‘only’ 36 people were murdered in the city’s streets on the same date in record-breaking 2021, and ‘just’ 34 in 2020, which saw 499 killings.

That ugly 37 number was three higher than the last time the Police Department updated the homicide numbers, for Thursday, January 20th, yet The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website main page and crime page show no stories on homicides over the weekend, and the crime page has several stories that are days old.

And so I found this, a Washington Post story, but reprinted in the Inquirer:

    Homicide rates have soared nationwide, but mayors see a chance for a turnaround in 2022

    For a decade, Atif Mahr mentored young people, preaching the virtues of anti-violence even as the streets of his north St. Louis neighborhood echoed ever more often with the crack of gunfire.

    by Griff Witte | The Washington Post | Sunday, January 23, 2022

    For a decade, Atif Mahr mentored young people, preaching the virtues of anti-violence even as the streets of his north St. Louis neighborhood echoed ever more often with the crack of gunfire.

    Then one day last October, those bullets tore a jagged hole in Mahr’s own family. His daughter Isis was dropping off a friend when a gunman unloaded on her car. The soccer standout, who had been saving money to pay her way through nursing school, was 19.

    “I always feared it,” Mahr said. “I never imagined it.”

    Isis’s death filled him with hurt. The reaction from the community, however, gave him hope.

    The past two years have been dreadful for public safety in U.S. cities as homicide numbers soared – in some cases to record levels. Experts say a constellation of factors is to blame, including the coronavirus pandemic’s scars and a breakdown in trust between police and the communities they serve during the social unrest of 2020. But as 2022 kicks off, city leaders from coast to coast say the stars may be aligning in a very different way.

    Flush with federal pandemic-relief funds, mayors are pumping money into crime prevention programs that have demonstrated early promise. Police chiefs are using advanced data to target places and people for intervention, even as they attempt to mend badly strained neighborhood ties. And communities such as Mahr’s, tired of burying their own, are rising up against those most responsible for the deaths. The result, some officials and experts say, may be a golden opportunity to break the trend of spiraling violent crime.

    “People have said ‘Enough is enough,'” Mahr said. “They’re ready to fight back.”

There’s more at the original. Here’s the link to the Post original.

The main thrust of the story refers to St Louis, Missouri. As we noted a few days before the New Year, KSDK proudly noted that homicides in 2021 had fallen back to “pre-pandemic” levels, with ‘just’ 192 souls sent untimely to their eternal rewards, compared to 263 in 2020, and 194 in 2019. The 2021 year-end total wound up being 196.

Being the numbers geek that I am, I actually did the math — and we know that math is racist, so that’s obviously a problem — and the numbers worked out to a homicide rate of 8.54 per 100,000 for white males, and 205.48 per 100,000 for black males in the Gateway City. Like Josef Stalin said, “One death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic.”

Both the Philadelphia and St Louis numbers represent too small a sample size to make any meaningful statements about trends in homicides, though with 37 murders in 23 days, Philly is on pace to another record number, 587 homicides. Even if the city’s killings slowed down to 2020’s pace, it would represent a bloodbath in the City of Brotherly Love.

And the Inquirer? The city’s newspaper, third oldest continuously published daily in America, is doing its job in steadfastly ignoring the deaths. We can find stories, from five days ago, about the cute white woman killed when some miscreant bludgeoned her to death with a pipe, and, also five days ago, about the man being charged with a firearms violation for fatally shooting the criminal trying to steal tha catalytic converter from his car. The story, from ten days ago, about the retired postal worker who defended himself with his legally-owned firearm, still shows, but there’s nothing there about the vast majority of the killings, because, to be bluntly honest about it, the victims were people about whom there was nothing exceptional about their killings.

I have mentioned, many times, Inquirer publisher Elizabeth Hughes’ statement that she was making the newspaper into an “anti racist news organization,” but I failed to delve into just what “anti racist” meant. From National Public Radio:

    ‘Not Racist’ Is Not Enough: Putting In The Work To Be Anti-Racist

    by Eric Deggans | August 25, 2020 | 12:03 AM EDT

    When the topic of racism comes up, I often think of a billboard in the small town of Harrison, Arkansas.

    It was a sign promoting a white supremacist radio station called White Pride Radio. The sign’s message, emblazoned next to the picture of a cute-looking white girl with a cute-looking dog, read “It’s not racist to [heart] your people.”

    My takeaway: Even white supremacists don’t want to be called racist.

    Which might explain why, for people dedicated to fighting racism, simply saying you’re “not racist” doesn’t feel like quite enough. To effectively defeat systemic racism — racism embedded as normal practice in institutions like education and law enforcement — you’ve got to be continually working towards equality for all races, striving to undo racism in your mind, your personal environment and the wider world.

    In other words, you’ve got to be anti-racist.

I have to ask: does “undo(ing) racism” in my “personal environment” mean that I must move from the 99.07% white county, even though it’s a poverty-stricken county in eastern Kentucky? We didn’t choose the place where we bought our retirement home due to the county’s demographics, but because it was what we wanted, for a very low price. I guess that doesn’t make me ‘anti racist’ enough!

What anti racism has come to mean, in the hallowed halls of American journalism, is to not tell the truth. The Sacramento Bee, the lead McClatchy newspaper, led the way in that company’s decision to stop publishing mugshots of criminals, by stating:

    Publishing these photographs and videos disproportionately harms people of color and those with mental illness, while also perpetuating stereotypes about who commits crime in our community.

Miss Hughes’ article pointed out that she was:

  • Establishing a Community News Desk to address long-standing shortcomings in how our journalism portrays Philadelphia communities, which have often been stigmatized by coverage that over-emphasizes crime.
  • Creating an internal forum for journalists to seek guidance on potentially sensitive content and to ensure that antiracism is central to the journalism.
  • Commissioning an independent audit of our journalism that resulted in a critical assessment. Many of the recommendations are being addressed, and a process for tracking progress is being developed.
  • Training our staff and managers on how to recognize and avoid cultural bias.
  • Examining our crime and criminal justice coverage with Free Press, a nonprofit focused on racial justice in media.

In simpler terms, under Miss Hughes’ leadership, the Inquirer will take decisions in its news coverage and editorial decisions based not only on whether the information being considered for publication is factual and well-sourced, but on whether it might reinforce negative stereotypes against a particular racial group. It makes itself obvious in the fact that the Inquirer simply does not report, save in the briefest terms, about the individual homicides in the city.

It also makes itself known in what the Inquirer says about the bloodbath in the city’s streets. It’s never about bad people shooting others, but “gun violence,” as though guns magically levitate themselves and fire away at innocent people, without any human agency at all. The editorial policy, as well as the political policies of the city’s Democratic leadership — and Philadelphia’s last Republican mayor left office while Harry Truman was still President! — has been to ignore the fact that the vast majority of both victims and perpetrators in city homicides, and in crime in general, have been black.

What has anti racism really become? At least in Philadelphia, it has become the acceptance of an urban black culture in which the killing of young black men by other young black men is just plain expected. The problem cannot be seriously addressed because it cannot even be admitted, because to admit it would be racist!

I am not the only one who has made fun of the notion that math is racist, but the Inquirer, along with many of our major, and not-so-major, daily newspapers, have adopted a policy which says, at bottom, that truth is racist, that facts are racist.

Elizabeth Hughes knows this, Inquirer editor Gabriel Escobar knows this, Lexington Herald-Leader editor Peter Baniak knows this, they all know this, but they knuckle under to political correctness anyway, because they just can’t handle the truth.

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The wealthy love them some fossil fuels!

The [ughh!] Magnolia Network is, this Saturday morning, running reruns of This Old House, season 41, originally broadcast in 2019-2020, a major, expensive, remodel of a home in Westerly, Washington County, Rhode Island. Westerly is a beach resort town which in the 2020 election gave 55.6% of its votes to Joe Biden; Washington County as a whole voted 58.57% to 39.20% for Mr Biden.

And what did the obviously wealthy homeowners, in liberal Rhode Island, in a show originally meant for the liberal Public Broadcasting System, choose for this project? One episode shows the installation of a 1,000 gallon underground propane tank, for their heating system, their water heater, their range, and their fireplace.

The remodeled kitchen; note the gas range. Click to enlarge.

The homeowners chose comfort, the homeowners chose fossil fuels!

Now, it is entirely possible that Scott and Shayla Adams, the homeowners,[1]The homeowners’ names were given on both the show and the website, so I am not doxxing them. were among the smarter people in Westerly, and voted for President Trump; I have no way of knowing that. But in one of our more liberal states, in very blue New England, we’re seeing reasonably wealthy homeowners eschewing the calls of the global warming climate change activists to go all-electric, and choosing what they believe is the better choice for themselves.

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↑1 The homeowners’ names were given on both the show and the website, so I am not doxxing them.