Posted on by

Let the punishment fit the crime

Brandon Combs, photo by Fayette County Detention Center, and is a public record.

Brandon Lee Combs, who must be presumed innocent of all charges until proven guilty, is currently lodged in the Fayette County Detention Center, charged with “TORTURE DOG/CAT W/SERIAL PHYS INJ OR DEATH”

KRS § 525.135 Torture of dog or cat:

  1. As used in this section, unless the context otherwise requires, “torture” means the intentional infliction of or subjection to extreme physical pain or injury, motivated by an intent to increase or prolong the pain of the animal.
  2. A person is guilty of torture of a dog or cat when he or she without legal justification intentionally tortures a domestic dog or cat.
  3. Torture of a dog or cat is a Class A misdemeanor for the first offense and a Class D felony for each subsequent offense if the dog or cat suffers physical injury as a result of the torture, and a Class D felony if the dog or cat suffers serious physical injury or death as a result of the torture.

It would seem that being charged with “serial” physical injury puts this as a Class D felony. The punishment for a Class D felony is imprisonment for “not less than one (1) year nor more than five (5) years.”

I wonder: will the Fayette County Commonwealth’s Attorney, Lou Ann Red Corn, show Mr Combs, if he is in fact the person who tortured Lillah, the same lenience she showed James Edward Ragland, when she allowed Mr Ragland to plead down from murder to manslaughter, setting a total sentence of ten years for fatelly shooting a woman in the back in a fight outside a strip club? If Iesha Edwards’ life didn’t matter more than that to Miss Red Corn, why should the physical pain and injuries to a dog merit five years in the clink?

If Mr Combs is convicted, I know to what punishment I would sentence him, but, of course, I’m not a judge.

Posted on by

A good guy in Philadelphia

Screen capture of tweet from Danielle Outlaw.

I will admit to being stunned. We noted, on Thursday, Philadelphia Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw’s tweet telling the people of the city what they should do if accosted by a carjacker, which was surrender:

  • If you are confronted by a carjacker, give up your car & leave the scene
  • Avoid verbal and physical confrontations
  • Make a mental note of suspect and their vehicle’s description
  • If there is a child in the vehicle, let the carjacker know “my child is in the car”

The Commissioner’s advice was simple: your car can be replaced, but you can’t be.

On Friday, we reported that some Philadelphians are not going so quietly, and are fighting back, and that a 60-year-old man in Mt Airy refused to be a victim, and shot the punk who tried to jack his car.

So, why am I stunned? Because The Philadelphia Inquirer published a very positive story about the victim who refused to be a victim!

    Grandfather recounts how he survived a shootout with a teen carjacker

    “I thought I got shot. That’s how close the bullet came to my head,” said Oliver Neal, 60, a retired U.S. Postal Service employee from Northeast Philly.

    by Mensah M Dean | Friday, January 14, 2022 | 6:00 PM EST

    As Oliver Neal stood on the sidewalk watching his white Pontiac being loaded onto a AAA flatbed truck Friday afternoon, he was still having trouble hearing in his left ear, he said.

    “I thought I got shot. That’s how close the bullet came to my head,” Neal, 60, said less than 24 hours after surviving an attempted carjacking in West Mount Airy. The 16-year-old gunman was shot in both legs and is hospitalized, according to police. They have not released his name.

    Neal, who has a license to carry a gun, was not charged with a crime.

    Other than the ringing in his ear and a small mark under his left eye, possibly caused by gunshot residue, he believes, Neal was uninjured despite being just several feet from the gunman during multiple exchanges of gunfire.

There’s more at the original, and I really wish I could relate more of it here, but that starts to become copyright infringement. All I can do is suggest that you should follow the embedded link to the original and read it yourself.

Mr Neal doesn’t believe that he is a hero, but to many people, he is now. He not only protected himself and his property, but he took a 16-year-old delinquent off the streets, albeit not permanently. ‘Social Justice’ District Attorney Larry Krasner will probably not allow the punk to be charged with anything serious, so unless his leg wounds wind up to be crippling, he’ll be back sticking guns in people’s faces to steal their stuff.

There is a bigger picture here, however. The 16-year-old might just learn his lesson, and straighten up and try to fly right. Trouble is, in Philly, he’s more likely to learn the lesson to just shoot first, and not give a future victim time to defend himself. Othe potential carjackers might hear of this, and take that same lesson.

The Inquirer? I expected an OpEd, or perhaps even a main editorial, telling readers just how unwise Mr Neal’s actions were. He could have died, we will (probably) be told, he could have killed that misguided young man, some pundit might say — as if that’s a bad thing! — and someone will probably rail about how this situation wouldn’t have escalated into violence if Mr Neal hadn’t been allowed a concealed carry permit, as though the fact that the assailant was carrying a weapon he wasn’t legally allowed to have was meaningless. Had the carjacker been killed, we’d soon be treated to stories from his wailing mother and aunts about how he was such a good boy and he shouldn’t have been killed over a simple, teenaged mistake.

But, at least so far, the pundits have been silent.
‘

Posted on by

Philadelphians are fighting back!

On Thursday morning, we noted Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw’s tweet about what Philadelphians should do if someone attempts to steal their car. Well, on Thursday night, a brave man acted against the Commissioner’s advice. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

    Man, 60, shoots suspected carjacker, 16, in West Mount Airy

    Philadelphia has experienced a dramatic surge in carjackings with 757 in 2021 compared to 404 in 2020.

    by Robert Moran | Friday, January 14, 2022

    Intersection of Sharpnack and Cherokee Streets, from Google Maps. Click to enlarge.

    A 60-year-old man shot and wounded an armed teen during a carjacking Thursday night in the city’s West Mount Airy section, police said.

    The incident occurred around 7:45 p.m. at Sharpnack and Cherokee Streets, where the 16-year-old boy attempted to take the man’s white Pontiac at gunpoint, police said.

    A gun battle ensued and the suspect was shot once in each leg and grazed in the chest. The teen was later apprehended in the area of Germantown Avenue and Slocum Street and taken to Einstein Medical Center, where he was listed in critical condition.

    At the crime scene, police found two firearms — one belonging to the driver on the hood of the Pontiac and the other on the ground in front of the car, as well as 13 spent shell casings.

Fortunately, the teenaged punk was a lousy shot; the car owner was not injured. Also fortunately, the owner had a license to carry a concealed firearm. And the Inquirer story also tells us why Commissioner Outlaw made her ‘don’t resist’ tweet: Philadelphians have been fighting back!

I had not seen those stories previously, and it’s not a surprise: the last three links were not to Inquirer stories, but to stories from the local television stations. Why, it’s almost as though the Inquirer doesn’t want people to know about carjacking victims fighting back. And the Police Commissioner certainly doesn’t want fighting back encouraged.

But law-abiding Philadelphians, people who go through the channels and have obtained permits to carry firearms, are fighting back, because the city and its law enforcement agencies, the Police Department and the District Attorney’s office, have not been fighting against crime very successfully. Commissioner Outlaw wrote:

    Last year, there were 757 reported carjackings in Philadelphia, an increase of 34% over 2020. Out of those 757 reported carjackings, police arrested 150 individuals, clearing 93 investigations through those arrests.

93 ÷ 757 = 0.1228533685601057. The Commissioner has just told people that the Philadelphia Police Department cleared by arrest a whopping 12.29% of carjackings in the city. How many of those 150 people arrested were actually convicted of anything under the George Soros funded District Attorney, Larry Krasner, was not told to us.

Crudely put, if you want to jack a car in the city, you have nine chances out of ten of getting away with it.

The City of Brotherly Love is one of the oldest in America. Founded in 1682 by William Penn, to be the capital of Pennsylvania Colony, if any city in America ought to be civilized, it should be Philly. Instead, it has become Dodge City, because under decades of Democratic rule, under a District Attorney more interested in exonerating criminals and going after police officers, and a Police Commissioner brought up in the soft-on-crime cities of Oakland, California and Portland, Oregon, the city is fighting for “social justice” rather than actual justice.

Posted on by

The left love them some authoritarian government . . . when they are in power

A few days ago, William Teach noted an article from The Business Standard:

    What if democracy and climate mitigation are incompatible?

    The COP framework is ill-matched to solving climate change in a timely fashion because it does not solve the international governance dilemma at its heart

    by Cameron Abadi | Sunday, January 9, 2022 | 11:05 AM

    In the past 14 months, the United States and Germany both held national elections that placed climate change policy squarely at the center of national debate. The fact that two of the world’s five largest economies committed to addressing the world’s most pressing crisis through public discourse followed by public voting was an unprecedented democratic experiment.

    It did not work out as optimists hoped. On the one hand, the victorious parties in both countries vowed to achieve what was necessary to prevent the worst effects of climate change from occurring, in accordance with the international climate agreement unanimously approved in Paris in 2015.

    But on the other hand, in neither country can the resulting policies be described as fulfilling that promise.

There’s a lot more at the original. But the two money paragraphs are further down:

    Representatives from the US and German governments say their policies are the result of the necessary compromises demanded by the democratic process. But it is fair to wonder whether that is just another way of restating the problem. . . . .

    Democracy works by compromise, but climate change is precisely the type of problem that seems not to allow for it. As the clock on those climate timelines continues to tick, this structural mismatch is becoming increasingly exposed.

Now comes Talking Points Memo:

    This Supreme Court Case Could Make Or Break The Biden Presidency (And The Planet)

    by Kate Riga | Thursday, January 13, 2022 | 10:29 AM EST

    The Supreme Court will hear a case in February that could decide the future of the Biden presidency — and gut its ability to mitigate climate change in the face of congressional inaction.

    The case, West Virginia v. EPA, centers on the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. Should the Court move to limit what the EPA can do, that, alone, would be incredibly significant.

    But the Court, with its heavily conservative slant, could take the opportunity to go further, slashing the power of federal agencies across the board, a move that would hobble the Biden administration’s ability to enact its climate agenda as well as a long list of other priorities.

    “There is a significant likelihood that how the Court handles this case will affect how much leeway agencies have to interpret authority statutes going forward,” Jonathan Adler, founding director of the Coleman P. Burke Center for Environmental Law at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law, told TPM.

    On environmental policy in particular, Congress has been unable or unwilling to pass major legislation for about 30 years, a stasis that has continued even as the dire threat of climate change has become evident. That leaves agencies like the EPA as the only entities available to take up the slack, slowing climate change through their regulatory and rule-making abilities. If the Court limits the EPA’s power to regulate, there are no strong, dependable avenues left on the federal level to make environmental policy.

Here is the fundamental error that the left assume: that because Congress has not passed the legislation they want, Congress has somehow failed to act. No, by not changing the law, Congress have said, in effect, we are happy enough with the laws already on the books.

    Fear of the Court’s potential for aggression here is not mere speculation. Last week’s arguments over a couple of Biden administration vaccine mandates gave the justices ample time to air their skepticism over the exercise of agency power, even in a case concerning health-care facilities where the agency’s congressionally-given authority is fairly explicit.

One thing is abundantly clear: Congress have given up far too much of their power to the executive branch, and mid-level bureaucrats who write ‘regulations’ which Congress would never pass if the members had to do something really radical like actually vote on them. If the President — any President — sometimes seems like a tinpot dictator, it’s because Congress have ceded to the executive too much authority in the first place.

    But the Court could go further, using this case in its quest to limit agency power. One of the tools the conservative justices could use to achieve that is the major questions doctrine, which holds that some issues are of such economic and political significance that the Court will assume that Congress did not intend to delegate that power to the agency unless the statute is specific.

    It’s squishy, and gives the justices significant power to smack down regulations: how do you determine levels of economic and political significance? How do you decide what statutory language is specific enough to count?

    The conservative justices also showed a willingness to approach cases through the lens of this doctrine in the vaccine mandate case last week, many suggesting in their questioning that Congress needed to be much more specific in its conveyance of authority.

Heaven forfend! that the Supreme Court say that it should take an act of Congress, rather than a decree from OSHA, that people would have to accept an injection into their bodies, or lose their jobs!

Do we really want to give to bureaucrats the authority to require the acceptance of a vaccine the long-term effects of which have yet to be tested? Do we really want to give to bureaucrats the authority to completely alter our entire energy production and transportation systems? That’s what Talking Points Memo seems to want, for one simple reason: what they want government to do are things which 535 individual Representatives and Senators would never pass, because they are, in the end, responsible to their constituents, to the actual voters.

If the public don’t want it, it should not be forced on us by government.

Posted on by

Law enforcement in the City of Brotherly Love

Screen capture of tweet from Danielle Outlaw. Click on image to go to original.

The main page of The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website was rather amusing on Thursday morning. The Inquirer referred to an article from just before the end of last year, on a date when the city recorded its 555th homicide, on its way to the record of 562 for 2021,[1]It’s early in the year, but things haven’t gotten any better. As of 11:59 PM EST on Wednesday, January 12th, there had been 20 homicides reported by the Philadelphia Police Department, up … Continue reading which told us, “Philly ranks No. 3 on a list of trendy and affordable cities: The Realtor.com report cited Philadelphia’s culture, history, and “quaint” neighborhoods.” I suppose that, based on median home prices and major urban amenities, it is. We’ve noted how aging hipster — can you really be a hipster at age 44? — Amanda Marcotte sang the praises of her new South Philadelphia neighborhood, saying that “Philly’s food scene is the hotness,” but if she’s ever written more about her new hometown, I’ve missed it. The Inquirer article touted the city’s “world-class food scene, and its many small businesses, shops and nightlife, walkability, and something-for-everyone offerings as reasons the city deserves its ‘trendy’ title.”

Yet, on Wednesday evening, the seemingly-appropriately named Police Commissioner for the City of Philadelphia, Danielle Outlaw, has tweeted out her advice to victims of carjackings. While there are some reasonable safety tips, one, “Make it a habit to start your car and drive away immediately,” is horrible: your engine needs a few seconds to pump the motor oil from the oil pan through the engine, so starting the engine and driving away immediately increases the wear-and-tear on it. But the Commissioner’s main advice was simply that, if someone attempts to steal your car, let him.

“Your vehicle can be replaced. You are irreplaceable!” the Commissioner tells Philadelphians, which is true enough, in the abstract sense, but for the people who live in the city’s more crime-ridden neighborhoods, their insurance might not replace that vehicle; having their car stolen means having no car, not just the inconvenience of having to get Flo from Progressive buy you a new one. Philadelphia has one of the highest poverty rates in the nation, but so many of the city’s liberals are wholly insulated from it.

Of course, many of the comments on the Commissioner’s tweet were along the lines of this one, “Buy a legal firearm, get you concealed carry permit. When these thugs attempt to ‘jack you, introduce them to your two friends, Smith & Wesson,” but let’s tell the truth here: if you had a legally-possessed weapon, and you used it against a carjacker in Philadelphia, District Attorney Larry Krasner would charge you for defending your property with deadly force. If you did the city a favor and insured that yours was the last vehicle that the carjacker attempted to steal, Mr Krasner would charge you with murder.

However, the two points I’ve mentioned, Philly’s trendiness and its awful homicide rate, are easily explained by one simple fact: as the Inquirer itself reported, less than three months ago, “Philly remains one of the most racially segregated cities in America: People from different racial and ethnic groups live in different neighborhoods, and the pace of desegregation has slowed.” Miss Marcotte and her ‘partner,’ Marc Faletti, can walk around South Philly in reasonable safety and security, and enjoy the food scene:

Our South Philly neighborhood, on the other hand, is a blast for those who spend way too much of their income on dining out. Local breweries are abundant, as well as experimental restaurants like Bing Bing, which serves a modern American spin on dim sum. And unlike New York, where you often have to travel an hour by subway to find good places to find more traditional Mexican or Asian cuisines, we’re in walking distance of one of the best taquerias on the East Coast and a tiny but magnificent Indonesian place.

For vegetarians like myself, Philadelphia’s restaurant scene is particularly amazing. It’s not just the nearly limitless number of excellent vegan restaurants, either. Nearly every place you eat out at here has a substantial number of vegetarian or vegan dishes, in contrast to New York, where some restaurants don’t even bother.

It’s no skin off her nose, but not that far away, in West Philadelphia,[2]West Philadelpha and South Philadelphia are not separate cities, but simply the names of neighborhoods and areas. Philadelphia has a lot of named neighborhoods. trying that is an attempt at avoiding darker corners, the open ends of alleys, and where some black residents are opposing physical improvements to sidewalks and streets because that might bring more white people into the neighborhood.

Miss Marcotte, and Inquirer urbanism writer Michaelle Bond can write about the trendiness of Philadelphia, because they have insulated themselves from the grittier neighborhoods, they have segregated themselves away from most of the city’s crime.

Commissioner Outlaw needn’t have bothered with her tweet: the areas in which carjackings are more likely to occur already know what they need to do, and the less crime ridden neighborhoods, which are, to be brutally frank about it, the whiter neighborhoods, where the liberals and the #woke don’t see the crime close up, can close their eyes to the things happening in Kensington and Strawberry Mansion.

References

References
↑1 It’s early in the year, but things haven’t gotten any better. As of 11:59 PM EST on Wednesday, January 12th, there had been 20 homicides reported by the Philadelphia Police Department, up from ‘just’ 13 on the same day in 2021’s record-setting year.
↑2 West Philadelpha and South Philadelphia are not separate cities, but simply the names of neighborhoods and areas. Philadelphia has a lot of named neighborhoods.
Posted on by

Black lives don’t really matter in Lexington

James Edward Ragland, photo by Fayette County Detention Center, public record.

Meet James Edward Ragland II, 31, from Detroit, Michigan. Mr Ragland was in Lexington, Kentucky, in Jaunary of 2019, at what Lexington Herald-Leader reporter Linda Blackford euphemistically called a “gentlemen’s club” — quotation marks in the original — when, in what the Lexington Police referred to as a “large disorder”, “a fight between several men and women broke out inside the club and moved outside the building just before the shooting.” In that melee, Mr Ragland shot and killed Iesha Edwards.

Mr Ragland fled the scene, but was arrested a month later in Detroit.

    On Jan. 31, Gaige Phillips, 29, was arrested in Detroit by U.S. Marshals on a charge of criminal facilitation to commit murder in the case, according to Lexington police. Phillips is accused of helping Ragland escape after the shooting.

Iesha Edwards, from her Facebook page. Click to enlarge.

Returned to Lexington, Mr Ragland faced a long list of charges, including murder, being a persistent felony offender, and two wanton endangerment, first degree, charges. But, because black lives really don’t matter, Mr Ragland was allowed to plead down! Fayette County Judge Julie Goodman sentenced Mr Ragland to ten years in prison after he accepted a plea bargain deal:

    Ragland had previously been charged with murder in the case but accepted a plea deal, reducing his charges and his sentence. He also pleaded guilty to two counts of wanton endangerment and one count of assault. He was sentenced to five years for each wanton endangerment charge, but Goodman decided to run those sentences at the same time as his manslaughter sentence.

    His fourth-degree assault conviction carried a sentence of 30 days, but because Ragland already had more than 2.5 years of custody credit while waiting for his case to be resolved, he won’t have to serve any additional time for that charge.

Mr Ragland was transferred to the Bluegrass State from Michigan, and booked into the Fayette County Detention Center on May 22, 2019. That means that he has been locked up in Kentucky for 964 days. With a sentence of 3652 days — 10 years, assuming two leap years — and 964 days already served, Mr Ragland has 2,688 days remaining on his sentence, if he’s not credited for three months in Michigan. That would put him completing his sentence on May 22, 2029, just a hair over seven years from now . . . . when Miss Edwards will still be stone-cold graveyard dead.

Supporting domestic violence survivor at the 2021 DV vigil. Photo from Commonwealth’s Attorney website. Click to enlarge.

So, I have to ask: did the Fayette County Commonwealth’s Attorney, Lou Ann Red Corn, believe that the evidence against Mr Ragland was shaky enough that he might be acquitted if he went to trial? Or did the life of Miss Edwards, the mother of two, just not matter all that much? Did Judge Goodman have no choice, via the plea deal, but to allow Mr Ragland’s multiple sentences to run concurrently, or did she have the option to have them run consecutively?

Miss Red Corn’s website has a couple of photos streaming through, one of them about domestic violence survivors, and another about helping victims, dominated by smiling white women, but, when the victim, when a murder victim, is a black woman killed outside a “gentlemen’s club,”[1]The natural assumption is that Miss Edwards was an employee of the Fox Club, and a stripper, but I have been unable to locate any confirmation of that, and do not take that assumption myself. well, we haven’t really been given enough information as to why Mr Ragland was offered a sweetheart plea deal which gets him out of jail while he’s still in his thirties, but the optics here aren’t very good.

Let’s face it: I’m a white man, one who has been very unimpressed with the #BlackLivesMatter movement. To me, much of it has been used as a way to excuse crime! But when I look at the attitude of the editors of The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Lexington Herald-Leader, and at the prosecutors in Philadelphia and Fayette County, and examine what they actually do, rather than what they say, my conclusion is that #BlackLivesMatter is, to them, nothing more than lip service.

We know one thing: while there is a possibility that Miss Red Corn’s evidence was weaker than that in which she felt confident, in the end, Iesha Edwards’ black life didn’t matter very much.

References

References
↑1 The natural assumption is that Miss Edwards was an employee of the Fox Club, and a stripper, but I have been unable to locate any confirmation of that, and do not take that assumption myself.
Posted on by

The Philadelphia Inquirer can’t handle the truth!

Might as well queue up Jack Nicholson and “You can’t handle the truth!” from A Few Good Men.

Screen capture of comments section, Sunday, January 10, 2022, at 7:32 PM EST. Click to enlarge.

On Sunday, we noted that The Philadelphia Inquirer ran a sports section piece on the University of Pennsylvania’s male-to-female transgender swimmer Will Thomas, who goes by the name “Lia” these days. The first paragraph of our article stated:

    I was surprised to see that The Philadelphia Inquirer allowed reader comments on this article. Since it is, supposedly, a sports article, and the Inquirer didn’t close sports articles to comments when they did so on everything else, maybe an editor hasn’t figured it out yet. As I start this article, at 9:10 AM, there are ten comments up, including two of mine; I wonder how long that will last.

The answer was: they didn’t last long!

I ran across a photo if the masthead of The Philadelphia Inquirer from February 25, 1953, and noticed the ‘taglines’ that it used: “Public Ledger” and “An Independent Newspaper for All the People”. By Public ledger, the Inquirer was setting itself up as Philadelphia’s newspaper of record, which Wikipedia defines as “a major newspaper with large circulation whose editorial and news-gathering functions are considered authoritative.” That Wikipedia article named four newspapers of record for the United States: The New York Times (Founded 1851), The Washington Post (1877), The Los Angeles Times (1881) and The Wall Street Journal (1889). First printed on Monday, Jun1 1, 1829, the then Pennsylvania Inquirer is older than any of them, and is the third oldest continuously published newspaper in America, behind only the Hartford Courant (1764) and the New York Post (1801). “An editorial in the first issue of The Pennsylvania Inquirer promised that the paper would be devoted to the right of a minority to voice their opinion and ‘the maintenance of the rights and liberties of the people, equally against the abuses as the usurpation of power.’”

Boy has that changed! As has happened to other great newspapers, the newsroom of the Inquirer was captured by the young #woke, who forced the firing resignation of Executive Editor and Senior Vice President Stan Wischnowski over the headline Buildings Matter, Too.

“Devoted to the right of a minority to voice their opinion”? Yeah, that failed, too, as the Inquirer closed comments on the majority of its articles, stating that:

    Commenting on Inquirer.com was long ago hijacked by a small group of trolls who traffic in racism, misogyny, and homophobia. This group comprises a tiny fraction of the Inquirer.com audience. But its impact is disproportionate and enduring.

Screen capture of comments at 5:35 AM EST on January 10, 2022. Click to enlarge.

Really? How do they know? How can they be sure that these views do not represent more than a “tiny fraction” of their audience? Have they really done the research, or was it just that 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 didn’t like the idea that the riff-raff could express their opinions? Empirically, the research had been done for them: ten comments — at least on Sunday morning — and not one of them supported the idea that Mr Thomas was actually a woman, or that him competing against biological women athletically was in any way fair. Are we to presume that only a “tiny fraction” of Inquirer readers oppose the idea that ‘trans women’ should compete athletically against ‘cis women’, yet only that ‘tiny fraction’ bothered to comment?

As of 5:35 AM — yes, I’m up early because I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep — there are five new comments, none of which support the idea that ‘trans women’ should compete equally against biological women, and it’s my guess that all of them will disappear as soon as the editors begin day shift and get to work. Of course, I screen captured them, because it wouldn’t be long before the Inquirer tried to hide the evidence.

The newspaper’s reasoning for eliminating comments on most articles was:

    Commenting on Inquirer.com was long ago hijacked by a small group of trolls who traffic in racism, misogyny, and homophobia. This group comprises a tiny fraction of the Inquirer.com audience. But its impact is disproportionate and enduring.

    It’s not just Inquirer staff who are disaffected by the comments on many stories. We routinely hear from members of our community that the comments are alienating and detract from the journalism we publish.

    Only about 2 percent of Inquirer.com visitors read comments, and an even smaller percentage post them. Most of our readers will not miss the comments.

If such a small percentage read the comments, how is it that they “routinely hear from members of our community that the comments are alienating”?

The truth that the #woke of the Inquirer can’t handle is that most people, people with some actual common sense, do not agree with the notion that someone like Mr Thomas, who was born male, who grew up male, who went through puberty as a male, and who competed, successfully, though not overwhelmingly so, as a male, can just decide that he’s a woman, take testosterone suppressants for a year, and is now indistinguishable from a biological female? For the journolists[2]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading at the Inquirer, the notion that girls can be boys and boys can be girls is ‘settled science,’ and must not be questioned.

This photo, from the Inquirer article, tells you all you need to know, but, who are you going to believe: the #woke, or your lying eyes?

References

References
↑1 From Wikipedia:

Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues.
By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.

↑2 The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
Posted on by

I missed one Two murders in Lexington in the first week of the year

On Saturday, I reported on Lexington’s first homicide of the year. The mistake I made was that it wasn’t the first!

    Lexington police investigating city’s first homicide of 2022, coroner confirms identity

    by Christopher Leach | Tuesday, January 4, 2022 | 7:23 AM EST | Updated: 1:49 PM EST

    Lexington police are investigating its first homicide of 2022 after a shooting near Deep Springs Elementary School left one person dead, according to police.

    Police said they responded to the area of Anniston Drive at 8:51 p.m. Monday. A 24-year-old male was found shot inside his residence.

    The Lexington Fire Department responded and advised the victim had died, per police. The Fayette County Coroner confirmed the victim’s identity as D’Andre Green.

There are a couple more paragraphs, but they basically say that the police have released no other information about the crime or suspects, and give contact information for the police for anyone who has information for them.

In an update to yesterday’s story, the Fayette County Coroner identified the victim in Friday’s homicide as Kobby Lee Martin, a 26-year-old man living in Lexington.

In a surprise to absolutely no one, the Lexington Police have not kept their homicide investigations page up to date, and neither killing has been listed. But the 2021 homicide investigation page shows that the first two murders in the city occurred on January 9th and January 21st, so 2022 has seen two killings earlier in the year than the first one in Lexington’s record-setting 2021.

Out of last year’s 37 homicides, the investigations page lists 13 as having been solved. That’s 35.14%.

Only nine days into the New Year, with ‘just’ two homicides, there is not enough information on which to justify any conclusions, but I will point out here that January of last year saw six murders, although one victim lingered on until early February and another late February before he expired.

Posted on by

The Philadelphia Inquirer props up transgender swimmer Will Thomas

I was surprised to see that The Philadelphia Inquirer allowed reader comments on this article. Since it is, supposedly, a sports article, and the Inquirer didn’t close sports articles to comments when they did so on everything else, maybe an editor hasn’t figured it out yet. As I start this article, at 9:10 AM, there are ten comments up, including two of mine; I wonder how long that will last.

    Lia Thomas swims on for Penn amid controversy

    Lia Thomas competed at home for last time in her Penn swimming career.

    by Scott Lauber | Saturday, January 8, 2022

    Penn swimmer Lia Thomas waits before competing in the 500m free race during a meet at UPenn’s Sheerr Pool in Philadelphia on Saturday, Jan. 8, 2022. Thomas is a transgender athlete who is among the nation’s top swimmers in her events. Photo by Heather Khalifa, Philadelphia Inquirer Staff Photographer. Click to enlarge.

    In the final home meet of her college career Saturday, Penn swimmer Lia Thomas won two freestyle races and continued along a path to the NCAA championships in March.

    And that would have been the end of the story except for this: Thomas is a transgender woman who is defeating most of her competition.

    So, as Thomas swung her right arm and touched the wall 1.47 seconds before Penn teammate Anna Kalandadze to win the 500-yard freestyle in a tri-meet against Yale and Dartmouth (Yale won the team competition), two female protesters held a “Stand Up 4 Women” sign on the sidewalk on Walnut Street and shouted about an unfair competitive advantage and a tilted playing field – or in this case, Sheerr Pool.

I do not normally like to include photos from the Inquirer, over plagiarism and copyright points, but this one falls under obvious Fair Use guidelines, in that it illustrates the point: does this swimmer look like a woman to you?

There are three other photos of the swimmer in the Inquirer article. The first is mostly unrevealing, but the second and the third show Will Thomas — The First Street Journal always refers to the transgendered by their real names and biologically appropriate pronouns — next to the women in the UPenn swim team, and the differences are obvious; Stevie Wonder could see that he isn’t a woman.

I did have to craft my two comments to not refer to Mr Thomas by his real first name or use the real gender pronoun to escape probable deletion. I asked:

    Did Thomas purposely drag out times to win, but not by so much? In the Zippy Invitational Event in Akron, Ohio, the one which attracted the greatest attention due to the staggering difference in times, Thomas won the 500- yard freestyle event in 4:34.06 to 4:48.99 for second-place finisher Anna Kalandaze, a 14.93 second margin. Thomas’ time would have finished 15th in the men’s final, ahead of ten other male swimmers. The last place male swimmer in the 500-yard freestyle, Luke Scoboria of Bloomsburg University, finished at 4:42.78, 7.21 seconds ahead of Kalandaze’s second-place time.

For someone used to writing in a more formal style, that paragraph is painful, as is my second comment:

    Several articles have noted that Thomas’ wins have been met with crowd silence, while the second-place touches of cis-women swimmers have been greeted with loud cheers. It may be politically correct to assert that the transgendered are the sex they claim to be, but, at least in the natatorium, the crowds appear to see it differently.

    I note that Scott Lauber, the article author, was very consistent in using the name “Lia” and the feminine pronouns to refer to Thomas. I know, I know: that’s the Associated Press’, and the Inquirer’s, stylebook, but it’s a subtle attempt to slant the debate in the politically correct direction.

Doing such is the telling of a deliberate lie — and Mr Lauber knows full well that Mr Thomas isn’t a real woman, but in a newsroom full of 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 he can’t say anything unless he has another job lined up — to push the politically correct notion of gender transition. Every bird, every mammal, and every reptile, can distinguish between males and females of their own species, but somehow, today’s left have educated that ability right out of themselves.

I am shocked that the Inquirer is even allowing such a discussion; none of the readers comments that exist as of the time of this writing accept the notion that Mr Thomas is a woman, and everyone sees the basic unfairness of allowing someone who went completely through puberty, and was fully developed as a male, to just decide he’s female and compete against female athletes in sex-segregated sports.

That’s just basic common sense, but common sense is in very short supply when it comes to the left and their acceptance that girls can be boys and boys can be girls.

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.