Posted on by

Killadelphia When will Mayor Jim Kenney, District Attorney Larry Krasner, and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw be held accountable for the chaos in Philadelphia?

What I have frequently called The Philadelphia Enquirer[1]RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt. doesn’t like to print stories about the murders in the city, because so many of them are one gang-banger, almost always black, shooting another gang-banger, the victim again almost always black. But the newspaper does love to do stories about innocent people being killed, so it is with some surprise it took until Monday for the Inquirer to get around to this story; WPVI-TV, Channel 6, had it on Friday.

    A 15-year-old boy, shot in Wissinoming while getting a case of water bottles from his dad’s car, has died

    Sean Toomey was shot in the head outside his family’s home on the 6200 block of Mulberry Street.

    by Chris Palmer | Monday, March 28, 2022

    Sean Toomey, photo from Tweet by Jaclyn Lee, 6ABC News.

    A 15-year-old boy who was shot in the head in Wissinoming last week while grabbing a case of water bottles from his father’s car has died, according to his family and Philadelphia police.

    Sean Toomey, of the 6200 block of Mulberry Street, was shot around 9:10 p.m. Thursday outside his family’s house on that block, police said.

    His aunt, Anna Toomey, said Monday that the teen had been inside the house before going out to retrieve the case of water when he was shot and collapsed on a neighbor’s lawn.

    Officers who responded took him to Jefferson Torresdale Hospital, where he was initially placed in critical condition. He was pronounced dead on Friday afternoon, police said Monday.

WPVI’s report noted:

    That woman called her boyfriend for help and by the time that boyfriend got outside, police say the two suspects ran off – but then shots were fired. Police have ruled out the boyfriend.

    “I heard the two pops and I thought it was firecrackers,” said Sean’s father, John. “But it only takes a second to grab some water and get in the house and he wasn’t coming back in. So I got curious, I put my sweatshirt on, and I went outside and I saw him lying on my neighbor’s lawn.”

    That’s when Toomey discovered his own son had been shot, once in the head, once in the side.

There’s more at the originals.

Homicide Capt. Jason Smith said on Monday that the police believe that the killing was related to a group of three men who had attempted at least two other robberies in the area just prior to the shooting. Though initial reports stated that young Mr Toomey was struck by bullets fired after the previous robbery attempts, police have not ruled out the possibility that the criminals tried to rob Mr Toomey personally.

    Police said three other people were slain over the weekend: A 28-year-old man was found dead from several gunshot wounds on the 400 block of Kingsley Street, in Wissahickon, around 11:50 p.m. Sunday; a 30-year-old man died after being shot on the 800 block of East Willard Street in Kensington around 11 p.m. Sunday; and 33-year-old Eric Sampson, of West Philadelphia, was fatally shot around 12:20 a.m. Friday on the 3500 block of Kensington Avenue in Kensington.

The Inquirer article stated that no arrests have been made in any of the homicide cases.

There have been 120 homicides in the City of Brotherly Love as of 11:59 PM EDT on Sunday, March 27th. That’s a 3.45% increase over the same date in record-shattering 2021, and 31.87% higher than in 2020, which was second all-time in in city murders with 499. The statistics are too close to state that 2022 will break 2021’s record of 562 homicides, but it seems almost certain that the 500 number will be eclipsed.

According to the Chicago Sun-Times, there have been 121 murders through Sunday in the Windy City, one more than in foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia, but the guesstimated population of Chicago is 2,671,635, while 1,576,251 people live in Philly.

At some point it has to be asked: when will Mayor Jim Kenney, District Attorney Larry Krasner, and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw be held accountable for the chaos in Philadelphia? These people have failed, utterly failed, in their jobs.

References

References
↑1 RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt.
Posted on by

Another problem for Joe Biden’s plan to eliminate all emissions from American electricity production in 13 years.

President Joe Biden and the Democrats, greatly concerned about global warming climate change, have urged an all-electric future for the United States, phasing out fossil fuel usage in transportation by requiring all new vehicles sold by the year 2035 to be zero-emissions, and that electric power generation be zero-emission by the same year. In The Long-Term Strategy of the United States: Pathways to Net-Zero Greenhouse Gas Emissions by 2050, John Kerry, Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, and Gina McCarthy, National Climate Advisor, said[1]The Long-Term Strategy of the United States: Pathways to Net-Zero Greenhouse Gas Emissions by 2050, page 5 of .pdf file.:

    Electricity delivers diverse services to all sectors of the American economy. The transition to a clean electricity system has been accelerating in recent years — driven by plummeting costs for solar and wind technologies, federal and subnational policies, and consumer demand. Building on this success, the United States has set a goal of 100% clean electricity by 2035, a crucial foundation for net-zero emissions no later than 2050.

    We can affordably and efficiently electrify most of the economy, from cars to buildings and industrial processes. In areas where electrification presents technology challenges — for instance aviation, shipping, and some industrial processes — we can prioritize clean fuels like carbon-free hydrogen and sustainable biofuels.

About those “plummeting costs for solar and wind technologies”? From The Wall Street Journal:

    Ukraine War Drives Up Cost of Wind, Solar Power

    ‘Greenflation’ problems are particularly acute in U.S., where tariffs targeting China helped increase project costs, led to delays before Russian attack

    By Jennifer Hiller and Katherine Blunt | Sunday, March 27, 2022 | 5:30 AM EDT

    Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is further driving up the price of renewable-energy projects, which were already facing supply-chain strains and raw-materials increases before the war.

    The new pressures, which are hitting two years after the pandemic created bottlenecks for wind and solar developers, are adding to delays for completing many projects.

    The Biden administration and other governments around the world have called for speeding the transition to renewable-energy sources to avoid reliance on Russia for oil and gas. But project developers say it might be nearly impossible to move faster in the near term.

    Wind and solar development has boomed world-wide in the past decade as a result of rapidly falling costs that made the projects more competitive with traditional sources of power generation such as natural gas and nuclear, as well as growing government pressure to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions to combat climate change.

    Globally, wind and solar accounted for about 6.4% and 4% of power generation last year, respectively, up from 3.8% and 1.4% five years prior, with further sharp growth projected, according to S&P Global Commodity Insights. The cost of solar generation fell to $45 for a megawatt-hour last year, down from $381 in 2010, S&P estimated. The cost of onshore wind generation, meanwhile, fell to $48 for a megawatt-hour, down from $89 in 2010.

Sounds good so far, but trouble comes with the next paragraph:

    But like many other businesses, renewable-energy projects are now being hit by soaring post-invasion prices for key materials such as aluminum and steel, as well as higher transportation costs stemming from higher oil prices, which have surged by more than 50% this year.

    The rising costs are particularly acute in the U.S., where many projects were already facing increases in part because of trade tariffs targeting China, a dominant producer of solar cells and other renewable-energy components. A third of U.S. utility-scale solar capacity scheduled for completion in the fourth quarter of 2021 was delayed by at least a quarter and 13% of the projects planned to complete this year have been delayed for a year or canceled, according to a new report from Wood Mackenzie and the Solar Energy Industries Association.

Infographic: China Dominates All Steps of Solar Panel Production | Statista Currently, the People’s Republic of China completely dominates all phases of solar panel production, producing 66% of polysilicon, 78% of all solar cells, and 72% of solar modules. More, 4% of solar cells and 1% of solar modules are produced in the Republic of China, Taiwan, which could be taken over by the People’s Republic any day.

Foreign Policy magazine noted that forced labor is used in much of China’s polysilicon production.

Back to the Journal:

    U.S. projects have also faced long wait times to receive necessary approvals to connect new projects to the electric grid, as developers rush to bring wind and solar farms online to capitalize on aggressive state mandates to reduce emissions, overwhelming grid operators. Those delays are adding to uncertainty for project investors.

Since Mr Biden took office, inflation has soared; the February year-over-year inflation rate was 7.9%, while real average hourly earnings decreased by 1.9%. Americans have been getting relatively poorer, and the data for the statistics were gathered before the invasion of Ukraine.

How, exactly, are we going to pay for this huge power generation transformation, all within 13 years? We’re going to be borrowing money, from Americans, from foreigners, and from China, to send to China, and having to pay back to investors, including Chinese investors.

We could, of course, do something really radical like build solar panel and module plants in the United States, but that will take years and, let’s tell the truth here, it will mean paying American wages, probably American union wages, to American workers, rather than the much lower Chinese wages, to build the solar collection systems, making them more expensive.

References

Posted on by

Ford’s plug-in electric F-150 Lightning can cost more than houses! When a car costs more than some houses, something is very, very wrong!

Sometimes I feel like I’m stepping on William Teach’s toes when I write about plug-in electric vehicles, but I’m sure that he’ll get over it. Ford Motor Company F: (%) has noted that the Environmental Protection Agency has confirmed its range miles for the 2022 F-150 Lightning plug-in electric truck:

300-320 miles for the Extended Range battery and 230 miles for the Standard Range battery.

Ford has officially confirmed the recently emerged EPA range numbers for the upcoming all-electric Ford F-150 Lightning pickup.

The manufacturer announced EPA Combined range values for all trim levels and both battery versions (Standard Range and Extended Range), emphasizing that in the case of ER battery, the range is actually 20 miles higher than the target.

In short, customers should expect:

  • Standard Range: 230 miles (370 km)
  • Extended Range (all trims, except of Platinum*): 320 miles (515 km) Platinum trim: 300 miles (483 km)

I used a screen capture of the article header as my headline because it showed an F-150 Lightning hooked up to a home charging station at a definitely expensive home. The link to the original is embedded in that header.

Why? Because at the bottom of the article was this chart.

The most basic electric F-150 is over $40,000, at $41,669.00. That tax credit? That isn’t what you pay pulling away from the dealer, but what you can get credited to your tax bill when you file your taxes, which could be the better part of a year after you but the vehicle. You’re going to have to pay the dealer $41,669, and, for most people, that means financing most of that amount, paying interest on most of that amount. Start adding options, and the price goes higher.

But what got to me was the costs of the F-150 with bigger wheels. An F-150 Lightning XLT ER with 20″ tires is going to cost you $74,169. Other versions can cost $69,169, $79,169 and $92,569.

As it happens, my wife and I bought a home in Estill County for her sister, 1,344 ft², with two bedrooms, one bathroom, and a detached one car garage. While my nephew and I did some plumbing work on it, and remodeled the bathroom, it was perfectly livable, and not a fixer upper. We paid $69,999 for the house.

In other words, we bought a perfectly livable house, built in 1920, just last December, for less than several versions of a Ford F-150 plug-in electric truck!

Ignore the furniture in the pictures; those are from the sales advertisement for the place.

Of course, that’s not the only house we’ve bought recently. In September of 2014, we bought our current house, a livable but nevertheless fixer-upper house, built in 1927, two bedrooms, one bathroom, with 7.92 acres of land and 500 feet of frontage on the Kentucky River, for a whopping $75,000.

No, that’s not a typo; I didn’t omit a trailing zero, or leading number to make it six digits.

Regular readers of this site — both of them — have seen photos of our kitchen before, but they were taken after we remodeled. 🙂

I bring this up because some of the liberal commenters on Mr Teach’s website keep telling us how wonderful plug-in electric vehicles are, and who knows, maybe they’re really great, but when your car costs more than a house, something is very, very wrong.

Yes, we live in east central Kentucky; the next county over, Lee, is the home of Beattyville, a place called the “poorest white town in America” from 2008 to 2012, so yes, housing prices around here are well below the national average. That doesn’t mean that houses here are undervalued; it means that houses elsewhere are over-inflated!

Posted on by

NBC News caught doctoring photo of ‘Lia’ Thomas

And the credentialed media drumbeat to validate the claim that ‘Lia’ Thomas, the University of Pennsylvania swimmer who now identifies as a woman is actually a woman continues. Born William Thomas, and ranked #562 as a male during his first three seasons on Penn’s men’s swim team, he’s now ranked #1 as a female, and won the NCAA Championship in the women’s 500 yard freestyle event.

First Twitter permanently banned Mark Margolis for saying that the ‘transgendered’ were a very small fraction of the population, which is objectively true — the Williams Institute guesstimated it at 0.6% of the population, and that organization also claims a higher percentage of the population are homosexual, 4.5%, than the Centers for Disease Control’s much lower figure[1]The Centers for Disease Control conducted the National Health Institute Survey in 2013, and found that only 1.6% of the population are homosexual, with another 0.7% bisexual, and another 1.1% either … Continue reading — and that ‘transgendered’ “have a mental disorder.”

And now we have this, from the New York Post, one of the few credentialed media sources which covers the subject honestly:

    NBC takes heat for airbrush of Lia Thomas

    By Jon Levine | March 26, 2022 | 8:02 AM EDT

    Doctored photo of Will Thomas. Click to enlarge.

    An image of controversial transgender swimmer Lia Thomas that aired on The Today Show was manipulated to make her appear more feminine, experts said.

    “The edited image has definitely undergone some sort of softening and smoothing effect,” Jonathan Gallegos, a former White House director of digital content for President Trump, told The Post. “It’s clear this job was not done by a professional. This level of skin smoothing is a hallmark sign of an amateur job.”

    “Wow. That’s really bad,” said a photographer who wished to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals from trans activists.

    Thomas — a biological male — made headlines last week after blowing fellow female competitors out of the water to win the 500-yard NCAA title.

    The allegedly doctored image of Thomas ran on The Today Show and posted to Twitter on March 17. The touched-up photo removed facial lines, skin discolorations, notable red impressions on her face caused by goggles, and blurred the adam’s apple. The show later ran the original photo — warts and all — in a clip posted to Twitter on March 18.

Undoctored photo of Will Thomas. Click to enlarge.

There’s more at the original. Even the Post goes along with the silly stylebook of referring to Mr Thomas by his made-up name and the feminine pronouns.

The differences between the two photos is subtle, but it is there. The most obvious change is in the coloration, as though it went through a filter, but the obvious question is: why would NBC News, purportedly a reliable journalistic source, alter a photo? The obvious answer is to present him as slightly more feminine than he is.

The credentialed media are attempting to influence the debate over whether girls can be boys and boys can be girls by using language tilted toward the idea that yes, people can change their sex.

Well, no, they can’t.

In the year 2525, if man is still alive, some anthropologist studying the United States prior to the devastation of World War III, is going to come across the grave of Mr Thomas. The records having all been destroyed, he will take accurate and scientific measurements of the remains. The soft tissues having long since decayed away, he’ll be dealing with the skeleton, and, taking measurements of the hip structure, he will write down in his notes, “The subject was male.” Probing more deeply, he gets lucky, and extracts a bit of DNA, examines it, and determines from the chromosomes, “The subject was male.”

Such will be objective determinations, based purely on science. The current claim, that ‘Lia’ Thomas is a woman, is based upon the entirely subjective claim by Mr Thomas that he feels like a woman.

Mr Thomas can claim to be a woman all he wants; as long as his claim is personal, and doesn’t infringe on other people’s rights, more power to him.

But his claim, having been taken seriously, has infringed on other people’s rights. He has robbed some real women swimmers of trophies, and the opportunity to swim in events for which they would otherwise have qualified were he not in the competition. Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson avoided the question of how she would define a woman because she knew that the question would come before the Court sooner or later, with sooner being more probable, and that will result in a legal decision which will impact other people.

Every bird, every reptile, and every mammal have the ability to distinguish between males and females of their own species. Only human liberals have managed to educate that ability out of themselves.

References

References
↑1 The Centers for Disease Control conducted the National Health Institute Survey in 2013, and found that only 1.6% of the population are homosexual, with another 0.7% bisexual, and another 1.1% either stating that they were ‘something else’ or declining to respond. The Williams Institute previously stated that 3.8% identify as LGTBQ.
Posted on by

The Philadelphia Inquirer tries to ramp up sympathy for the drunk driver who killed three men

Jayana Webb mugshot, via Fox29 News.

On early Monday morning, March 21, 2022, 21-year-old Jayana Webb killed 29-year-old Pennsylvania State Police Trooper Brendan Sisca, 33-year-old State Trooper Martin Mack, and 28-year-old electrician Reyes Rivera Oliveras. No, Miss Webb didn’t pull a gun and shoot them; she used a Chevy Captiva.

    On I-95, four lives converged in a crash that left three dead and a young person facing steep consequences

    Communities are mourning the deaths of two Pennsylvania State Police troopers and a ‘happy’ man. The driver’s friends are reckoning with her alleged crimes.

    by Ryan W. Briggs , Rodrigo Torrejón, and Max Marin | Friday, March 25, 2022 | 7:52 PM EDT

The story begins with brief biographies of the slain State Troopers and Mr Oliveras, which you can see if you follow the link to the Philadelphia Inquirer original. I have omitted quoting that part here, because I don’t want to cross the line into plagiarism. It’s further down that the infuriating part begins:

    Then there was Jayana Webb, 21, a track star-turned-hair stylist, barreling toward them in a silver Chevy Captiva.

    At 12:47 a.m., Webb wrote on Twitter that she had been stopped “doing 110 in a 50″ mile-per-hour zone. While state police have neither confirmed nor denied the stop, multiple news outlets reported that Mack and Sisca stopped the woman for speeding on the interstate that night.

    Around the time of the tweet, state police said the troopers were abruptly redirected to assist a man apparently attempting to cross the highway near Lincoln Financial Field. The troopers bolted south, and found Oliveras.

In other words, Miss Webb was about to get away with going 60 MPH over the speed limit. That’s more than just speeding; that’s reckless driving. Unfortunately, reckless did not translate into wreckless.

    Webb, who prosecutors said admitted to drinking Hennessy cognac that night, proceeded south on I-95 and crashed into the three men at such a speed that the impact ripped the doors off their stopped state police SUV and sent the troopers flying over a highway divider.

The troopers and Mr Oliveras were in the left hand median; to have struck them, Miss Webb had to have been driving down the “hammer” lane, the left-hand passing lane. She got away with speeding, and she was speeding again.

    All three men were pronounced dead shortly afterward. Webb and a passenger survived, and, according to police audio recordings, attempted to walk away but were escorted back to the scene.

    The ensuing investigation shut down I-95 for nearly eight hours, as investigators attempted to piece together what happened. But days later, why Oliveras was on I-95 at 1 a.m. Monday, and how Webb came to be speeding toward him and the troopers, remain largely a mystery.

It’s not a mystery how Miss Webb came speeding toward the scene: she got away with the initial stop by sheer dumb luck, and then used that luck to prove how dumb she really is.

    Webb now faces three counts of third-degree murder and potentially decades in prison. Her friends are reckoning with how a popular and promising young entrepreneur ended up in jail without bail over the deaths of three men.

“(A) popular and promising young entrepreneur”, huh? Here the Inquirer is trying to humanize her, to make her sympathetic character, not a killer, not a murderess, but just some poor thing who happened to make a mistake.

    Image of tweet, via Fox29 News. Click to enlarge.

    By the time Webb’s mugshot hit national news, she had already shown indications of reckless driving. Tweets from before the crash quickly emerged in which she bragged about drinking and driving. One January post read: “If you ask me, I’m the best drunk driver ever.”

    Some in her social circle, meanwhile, were in shock. How could Webb — a track-and-field star with no past DUIs and a hair-braiding business — be responsible for the deaths of three people?

    Some said Webb deserves what’s coming. Others, sometimes posting under the hashtag “#TeamJay,” said Webb made a terrible error, egged on by a pervasive culture of casual drunk driving.

    “What she did was not right,” said a friend, who spoke to the The Inquirer on condition of anonymity due to the high-profile nature of the case. “But at the same time we’re all human and we all make mistakes.”

Jayana Webb perp walk, via Fox29 News. Click to enlarge.

There’s more at the original, and it’s utterly disgusting. The Inquirer let us know what a wonderful person she really was, someone who just happened to get caught up in a culture of drinking, partying hearty, and driving drunk. Remember: the Inquirer also tried to make a martyr out of 12-year-old Thomas Siderio, Jr, who fired a shot at Philadelphia Police officers, and wrote about the killing of 13-year-old Marcus Stokes as though he was an innocent kid just walking to school, when he was not.

It’s really not her fault, you know, she just made a mistake.

A mistake that left three men, three men with families, three apparently hard-working men, stone cold graveyard dead.

The joy that Miss Webb apparently found in doing 110 MPH on I-95, in “tearing up Kelly Drive,” was not mirrored in her face during her perp walk. Even soft-hearted and soft-headed District Attorney Larry Krasner can’t let this slide, though he’ll probably go for sentences less than the maximum. The penalty for third-degree murder in Pennsylvania is 10 to 20 years in prison. Three consecutive 20-year sentences puts her behind bars until she’s 81 years old, but we all know that Mr Krasner won’t go for that. Watch for a lenient plea bargain from the District Attorney.

Me? I have exactly zero sympathy here. If Miss Webb is found guilty, she should get out of jail when Troopers Sisca and Mack and Mr Oliveras come back to life.

Posted on by

A very minor omission in The Philadelphia Inquirer The difference between journalism and journolism

I use the term ‘journolism’ to refer to heavily biased reporting. It’s not a misspelling: my of 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. Many times biased journalism comes not from stating something false, but the omission of pertinent information, and boy, did Philadelphia Inquirer writers Ximena Conde, John Duchneskie, and Aseem Shukla do that here!

    Chart from The Philadelphia Inquirer, March 25, 2022. Click to enlarge.

    Philly had its largest one-year population decline since 1975: See charts that show the factors

    The drop in total population follows almost a decade of population growth for Philadelphia.

    by Ximena Conde, John Duchneskie, and Aseem Shukla | Friday, March 25, 2022

    Philadelphia lost almost 25,000 residents in a year, according to new census data looking at a full year of the pandemic released Thursday.

    The drop in total population between July 2020 and July 2021 is the largest one-year decline since 1975 and follows almost a decade of population growth for Philadelphia, which topped 1.6 million residents in 2020. The losses were driven primarily by the residents who moved out of the city, which exceeded the number of people moving into Philly.

    In the U.S. Census Bureau’s 12-month snapshot, Philly saw the highest disparity since 2001 between people moving in and those moving out. That difference led to a net loss of more than 28,000 residents, doubling what census numbers showed for the year prior.

There’s a lot more at the original, which you can read by following the link embedded in the headline.

The article gives some of the reasons for the city’s guesstimated population loss:

  1. A desire to flee crowded urban centers, something which will disappoint the global warming climate change activists, who see pushing more people into urban areas as a way to decrease CO2 emissions due to automobile traffic.
  2. Young adults moving back in with parents, in part due to the recession caused by responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Philadelphia persisted with restrictions after many other areas had dropped them, though much of that occurred after the data for this study was collected.
  3. More affluent residents leaving to second homes; the article makes no mention as to why such people wouldn’t be counted among current population numbers if they did not sell their city homes.
  4. City dwellers leaving cosmopolitan life in exchange for green space. The COVID-19 shutdowns and lockdowns produced a greater desire for having your own backyard.
  5. Immigration into the city decreased while President Trump was in office, but the article suggests that it will increase again now that Joe Biden is in office.
  6. A significant narrowing of the gap between live births and deaths.

The article writers noted that the population estimates are not as accurate as the actual census counts, so the data are at least questionable.

But despite the “few possible factors driving the Philly departures” given, one was conspicuous in its absence: the writers never mentioned Philadelphia’s huge crime rate! 2020, the first year of the panicdemic pandemic, saw the city’s homicide numbers jump from 356 in 2019 — which was already the highest since 2007 — to 499, good for second place all time, and only one short of the record of 500, set during the crack cocaine wars of 1990. Then, in 2021, that record was blown to smithereens, with 562 murders.

The police were hobbled by a social and racial justice prosecutor who is more interested in finding malfeasance among the police than he is with prosecuting actual criminals, the idiotic #BlackLivesMatter protests which further alienated the population from the police, and the Inquirer itself, which, under “anti-racist” publisher Elizabeth “Lisa” Hughes and new Executive Editor Gabriel Escobar, has editorial policies very much in tune with District Attorney Larry Krasner’s philosophy of soft-peddling crime stories because they might negatively impact and stereotype the black community in the city.

According to the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page, there have been 115 homicides in the City of Brotherly Love as of 11:59 PM EDT on Thursday, March 24th, three more than the same date last year, meaning that Philadelphia is on a path to come very close to, and possibly exceeding, the 562 record. Fortunately, the latest man killed was a criminal attempting to rob a Dollar General store, shot dead by the store manager after the would-be robber made threatening moves with what turned out to be a toy gun in his jacket pocket.

As Robert Stacy McCain would say, “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.”

    In other gun violence Thursday night, a 15-year-old boy was shot in the head and right side of his body around 9:10 p.m. in the city’s Wissinoming section, police said.

    The shooting occurred in the area of Mulberry and Devereaux Streets. The teen was taken by police to Jefferson Torresdale Hospital. He was reported in extremely critical condition.

    Police received preliminary information that two males suspected in the shooting also attempted a gunpoint robbery a short time earlier in Mayfair.

Philadelphians see stories like this every day, perhaps not in the Inquirer, but the local television stations carry the stories. In a city in which the quality of life is spiraling downward, in which the voters have just re-elected a softer-than-soft on crime District Attorney, in which Dollar General store managers feel the need to carry a firearm to protect his employees and himself because, when seconds count, the police are only minutes away, how is it that three well-educated and well-paid Inquirer reporters can simply omit the fact that Philadelphia is wracked with crime and violence as one possible reason that people are moving away?

Well, perhaps I’m being unfair in blaming the three reporters; it’s entirely possible that they did include it, but Editor Gabriel Escobar or one of his minions blue penciled it.[1]Yes, I know: I’m showing my age! But, whoever is responsible is showing the journolism of the Inquirer, while Mr Escobar and Miss Hughes and the Lenfest Institute which owns the paper scratch their heads, wondering why the newspaper is losing readers.

References

References
↑1 Yes, I know: I’m showing my age!
Posted on by

Some truths just don’t fit Teh Narrative For some on the left, when the truth doesn't fit their political beliefs, they just deny the truth!

Even Bruce Jenner, the winner of the men’s Decathalon in the 1976 Olympics, but is now so f(ornicated) up in the head that he thinks he’s a woman agrees: Will Thomas, the ‘transgender’ swimmer for the University of Pennsylvania’s women’s swimming team who now calls himself ‘Lia,’ is not the real winner of the 500-yard NCAA women’s freestyle championship:

For the past several months, she has been a vocal opponent of Thomas competing against women.

“[Lia Thomas] is also not good for women’s sports,” Jenner told Fox News in January. “It’s unfortunate that this is happening. I don’t know why she’s doing it. She knows when she’s swimming she’s beating the competition by two laps. She was born as a biological boy. She was raised as a biological boy. Her cardiovascular system is bigger. Her respiratory system is bigger.

“Her hands are bigger. She can swim faster. That’s a known. All of this is woke world that we’re living in right now is not working. I feel sorry for the other athletes that are out there, especially at Penn or anyone she’s competing against, because in the woke world you have to say, ‘Oh my gosh, this is great.’ No it’s not.”

Mr Jenner is certainly right about one thing: it is 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 who are driving this.

Lia Thomas’ NCAA championship performance gives women sports a crucial opportunity

Anyone who cares about the advancement of sports, and women’s sports in particular, should celebrate her win.

By Cheryl Cooky, Purdue University professor of American studies and women’s, gender and sexuality studies | March 21, 2022 | 3:31 PM EDT

Just Dr Cooky’s title, professor of American studies and women’s, gender and sexuality studies, ought to tell you that she’s a bit kookie! What professions are there for “women’s, gender and sexuality studies” majors other than university professors?

On Saturday, University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas placed last in the 100-yard freestyle swim during the NCAA championships, ending her career in collegiate swimming. A last-place showing at an NCAA swim meet, even a championship one, would not typically garner national headlines. Yet, Thomas has been at the center of controversy regarding her eligibility to compete in women’s events.

After Mr Thomas’ many victories in women’s swimming, who here believes that he didn’t deliberately throw the 100-yard freestyle race, having already won his trophy in the 500, just to try to tamp down criticism that he was proving he isn’t really a woman by dominating these races? He did, after all, win admission to the University of Pennsylvania, a private, Ivy League school which does not award scholarships based on athletic merit. He can’t be stupid; he knows the criticism which has followed his participation on the women’s swim team.

We have previously noted Mr Thomas times in the Zippy Invitational in Akron, Ohio. In the 500-yard freestyle final, Mr Thomas defeated his teammate, Anna Sofia Kalandaze, who finished second, 4:34.06 to 4:48.99, a 14.93 second margin; Miss Kalandaze defeated the seventh-place finisher by 7.42 seconds, just half of the time she was behind Mr Thomas.

Mr 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 Miss Kalandaze’s second-place time. His year of taking testosterone suppressants — he has not yet been castrated undergone ‘sexual reassignment surgery — have obviously not done what the NCAA believe it would.

Are we supposed to believe that more than a year of testosterone suppression ‘therapy’ left him reasonably competitive with men’s swimming times just four months ago, but three more months radically reduced his performance, or is it more reasonable to think that he deliberately shaded his times for political reasons?

This controversy came to an apex last week at the NCAA championships when she became the first openly trans athlete to win a Division I championship in any sport. For anyone who cares about the advancement of sports, and women’s sports in particular, her win should be celebrated.

Women’s sports are situated at a paradoxical intersection wherein sex segregation is upheld through claims of biological difference, yet equality is prefaced on being treated the same and given the same opportunities as men. If we are to change this, we need to ask some important questions. How does one advocate for equitable treatment while also adhering to the notion of biological difference? If separate is not equal in the case of schools, bathrooms, restaurants or other social institutions, can separate ever truly be equal in the case of sports? Would gender-based discrimination in sports be eradicated if sports were gender-integrated?

In this, Dr Cooky assumes that males and females are physically equal, even though they are physically different.[2]I wonder: if it is discrimination to differentiate between men and women in sports, would that mean that if two men males wanted to compete together in pairs figure skating or ice dancing, would that … Continue reading Sexual dimorphism is a real thing:

Sexual dimorphism is the systematic difference in form between individuals of different sex in the same species.

For example, in some species, including many mammals, the male is larger than the female. In others, such as some spiders, the female is larger than the male. Other sex-specific differences include color (most birds), song in birds, size or presence of parts of the body used in struggles for dominance, such as horns, antlers, and tusks; size of the eyes (e.g., in the case of bees); possession of stings (various kinds of bees), and different thresholds for certain behaviors (aggression, infant care, etc.).

Sexual dimorphism in humans is the subject of much controversy. Human male and female appearances are perceived as different, although Homo sapiens has a low level of sexual dimorphism compared with many other species. The similarity in the sizes of male and female human beings is a good example of how nature often does not make clear divisions. To give an accurate picture of male and female size differences one would need to show how many individuals there are in each size category. There is a considerable overlap.

For example, the body masses of both male and female humans are approximately normally distributed. In the United States, the mean mass of an adult male is 78.5 kg, while the adult female mean is 62.0 kg. However the standard deviation of male body mass is 12.6 kg, so 10% of adult males are actually lighter than the female average.

These differences have real, physical consequences, with human males being physically taller, stronger, faster and quicker than human females on average. That some women are taller than some men is certainly the case, but it is very much outside the norm. My sisters, for example, with the same father and same mother, are eight and ten inches shorter than me, and far lighter. Dr Cooky can hold the view that men and women are equal, if she chooses, as women do have certain advantages: they tend to live longer, and have lower rates of cardiac disease. Women and men can be equally intelligent, though they tend to choose different academic pursuits.

But athletics, despite the wide variety of sports, is a narrow pursuit, and in athletics, the physical differences are important. Certain sports, such as curling, so not depend on size and speed, but on perception and precision, and men and women can compete on an equal basis. My alma mater, the University of Kentucky, just won their second consecutive NCAA Rifle championship, and rifle teams are sexually integrated.

But sports which depend on physical strength, speed and endurance? No, women and men simply cannot compete on the same level. To Dr Cooky, this is an assault on the concept of equality, but if it is, then truth is an assault on equality.

Those who oppose the inclusion of trans women in women’s sports argue that trans women have an unfair competitive advantage and that as a result they will take away opportunities from cisgender athletes. According to the NCAA, these assumptions are not well founded. Moreover, there is a lack of scientific evidence that conclusively demonstrates a direct link between testosterone and athletic performance.

Why, then, do athletes who are using ‘performance-enhancing’ drugs use testosterone as one of those drugs?

Athletic performance is influenced by a number of factors, including hormones, but also other things like coaching and training, psychological makeup of an athlete, access to resources and equipment, among others. Attempts to ban or limit the participation of trans athletes are not based on science. Instead, they are rooted in societal and cultural definitions of what constitutes gender or what defines a woman. Such questions matter because sports are organized based on the belief of natural differences between men and women, and they are sex-segregated as a result. Yet, this ultimately leads to the discrimination of athletes like Thomas.

Here Dr Cooky concedes that the “psychological makeup of an athlete” makes a difference, and in Mr Thomas case, that “psychological makeup” has been dominant: he went from being ranked 562nd among male swimmers, to first among female swimmers. He is 6’3″ tall, physically massive, and completed puberty as a male.

In the end, Dr Cooky is worried that acknowledging the physical differences between men and women, and that those physical differences have a significant impact on athletics, somehow acknowledges male superiority, something she simply cannot tolerate politically. And thus she, like so many others on the left, are having to take utterly idiotic positions, positions which deny simple truths, because some truths just do not fit within their political paradigm.

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 I wonder: if it is discrimination to differentiate between men and women in sports, would that mean that if two men males wanted to compete together in pairs figure skating or ice dancing, would that have to be allowed?
Posted on by

15-year-old arrested in Philly for shooting two teenaged girls Yazid West is expected to face charges for two other shootings, all over a 13-day span

There are times I just can’t figure out The Philadelphia Inquirer. Yes, the alleged offender, if he is guilty, is a really bad guy, and someone who needs to be off the streets forever. But, just as they did in the killing of Samuel Collington, the Inquirer publicly identified an arrested juvenile suspect.

    A 15-year-old arrested this weekend is a suspect in three shootings this month, Philly police say

    Yazid West has been charged with shooting two teen girls near Temple University. Capt. John Walker said West is also expected to face charges in two other incidents.

    by Chris Palmer | Monday, March 21, 2022

    A 15-year-old boy arrested by Philadelphia Police this weekend is a suspect in three shootings over the past three weeks, authorities said Monday.

    Yazid West was being held on $2 million bail after police say he shot two teenage girls, ages 16 and 17, in a car near Temple University on Friday night. Capt. John Walker said West and his friends had a chance encounter with the girls, who were in a Nissan Altima, around 10 p.m. on the 1400 block of Cecil B. Moore Avenue, and when one of the girls deployed pepper spray out of the car’s window, West responded by firing eight shots at them.

    One of the victims was struck in the leg, police said, the other in the back. Both were taken to Temple University Hospital in stable condition.

    West and several other teens with him, meanwhile, ran away, but Walker said responding officers pursued the group and arrested West about a mile from the crime scene. Surveillance video of the incident shows West committing the shooting, Walker said. He faces charges including attempted murder, aggravated assault, and weapons violations.

There’s more at the original.

It’s important to note: Mr West can be charged as an adult, despite his age, and he should be.

The Inquirer noted that young Mr West was a suspect in two other shootings, on March 5th and 15th. Three shootings, in a span of 13 days — “over the past three weeks,” as Inquirer reporter Chris Palmer put it, was unnecessarily vague — means that Mr West is, allegedly, an extremely volatile and dangerous young man who cannot be trusted to be out on the streets.

  • 1500 block North Gratz Street. Click to enlarge.

    The March 5th incident has Mr West shooting a 14-year-old near Broad Street and Cecil B. Moore Avenue, in retaliation for the shooting of a shooting the previous evening, the victim being one of Mr West’s friends. The shooting was captured on surveillance tape.
  • The March 15th incident alleges that Mr West shot into a house in the 1500 block of North Gratz Street, in which the mother had forbidden her son to associate with Mr West and his friends.

North Gratz Street isn’t even a depressed neighborhood. The 1500 block consists of relatively new, practically identical duplexes, and Zillow lists nearby 1729 North Gratz, an older row house, as being for sale listed at $449,999, 1817 North Gratz for $309,000, 1811 West Oxford Street, on the corner of the 1600 block of North Gratz, for $369,000, and 1526 North Gratz, though not on the market, was assessed at $253,000 in 2021.

It would be nice if Inquirer reporters took the time that I have to investigate the neighborhood, to put some perspective on the crimes. The research for the above paragraph took me a whopping ten minutes!

I am reminded of 12-year-old gun-toting Thomas Siderio, Jr, whom the Inquirer is trying to turn into some kind of martyr, even though he (allegedly) shot at Philadelphia Police officers. We know that young Mr Siderio got little parental supervision: his father has been behind bars for the last three years, and that wasn’t his first felony conviction, while his mother also has a criminal record, with two drug cases and other arrests for theft, forgery, contempt of court, and receiving stolen property. The son as primarily lived with a grandmother, but also lived with a great-aunt.

So, will we learn about the parents of young Mr West? He was, again allegedly, a gang-banger wannabe, and had a bad enough reputation that at least one mother forbade her son to associate with him. Where did Mr West live, and who were the adults who were supposed to be supervising him?

But one thing we do know, and that’s the City of Brotherly Love has a real cultural problem, a problem in which adolescents, in which 12 and 14 and 15-year-olds are out on the streets, armed, shooting at people, and their parents or grandparents or guardians are either so clueless that they don’t know about it, or so disinterested that they just don’t care.

Posted on by

So, who failed here? It seems that Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson isn't the only one being soft on child porn sentences

This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s record of sentencing child pornography case offenders to below the minimum in federal sentencing guidelines looks like something that even Joe Biden wouldn’t have been stupid enough to ignore before nominating her to the Supreme Court, if he knew about it, so the obvious question becomes: who in the Administration failed to discover this during the vetting process?

That, at least, was what I thought when I first heard about this pattern of sentencing. Then I read this article, and it isn’t pretty:

Fact check: Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson child porn sentences ‘pretty mainstream’

Monday, March 21, 2022 | 9:02 PM EDT

Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson open this week amid a flurry of misleading allegations by Republican Sen. Josh Hawley that the nominee has a “long record” of letting child porn offenders “off the hook” during sentencing.

“In every single child porn case for which we can find records, Judge Jackson deviated from the federal sentencing guidelines in favor of child porn offenders,” Hawley tweeted Thursday, highlighting nine cases from her time as a federal District Court judge.

How, I have to ask, are Senator Hawley’s “allegations” that Judge Jackson “has a ‘long record’ of letting child porn offenders ‘off the hook’ during sentencing” “misleading”? Did she, or didn’t she impose more lenient sentences on convicted child porn offenders?

While court records show that Jackson did impose lighter sentences than federal guidelines suggested, Hawley’s insinuation neglects critical context, including the fact that the senator himself has voted to confirm at least three federal judges who also engaged in the same practice.

Oh, so she did do what the distinguished gentleman from Missouri said that she did.

Federal appeals court Judges Joseph Bianco of the Second Circuit and Andrew Brasher of the Eleventh Circuit, both Trump appointees, had each previously sentenced defendants convicted of possessing child pornography to prison terms well below federal guidelines at the time they were confirmed with Hawley’s support, an ABC review of court records found.

Asked about the votes Monday by ABC News, Sen. Hawley made clear he has never supported a high court nominee with a similar record in child porn sentencing cases. “Not for this court I haven’t, not for the U.S. Supreme Court,” Hawley told ABC’s Rachel Scott when asked whether his criticism of Judge Jackson presented a double standard.

Hawley said he would not consider a below-guidelines child porn sentence “acceptable” from a nominee and suggested that he was not aware of the times Judges Bianco and Brasher and a third judge, Carl Nichols of the D.C. District Court, had rendered such judgments.

Apparently ‘what aboutism’ is the defense being used to support Judge Jackson on this. If Senator Hawley knew about such in the record of previous nominees for whom he voted, then shame on him, but it is obvious that nominees for lower courts don’t receive the same type of delving into their records that Supreme Court nominees do.

Skipping down a few paragraphs, we come to this:

“If and when we properly contextualize Judge Jackson’s sentencing record in federal child porn cases, it looks pretty mainstream,” wrote Doug Berman, a leading expert on sentencing law and policy at The Ohio State University School of Law.

“Federal judges nationwide typically sentence below the [child porn] guideline in roughly 2 out of 3 cases,” Berman noted on his blog, and “when deciding to go below the [child porn] guideline, typically impose sentences around 54 months below the calculated guideline minimum.”

Professor Berman continued to note that below-range sentences are frequently requested by prosecutors, including some on the cases before Judge Jackson, and that many judges determine that the guidelines are “unduly harsh,” especially when it comes to “first-time offenders.”

And that is the problem!

Let me be clear here: child pornography offenders, whether first-time or otherwise, are sick bastards who need to be locked up for as long as the law allows. Forget the purely advisory sentencing guidelines, just throw them in jail, and hide the key for as long as it can be hidden. Under 18 USC §2252A, a person who is convicted of knowingly possessing child pornography can be sentenced up to 10 years in prison or up to 20 years in prison if the minor depicted in the image is under the age of twelve. A person who is convicted of distributing or receiving child pornography faces a 5 to 20 year prison sentence, and prior convictions can lead to longer sentences.

Ten years, twenty years, is not too harsh a sentence for these offenses; such sentences are, in fact, too lenient. Judges should have multiple count conviction sentences run consecutively, not concurrently.

Of course, read the wording here: when prosecutors recommend specific sentences, it almost always means that this is part of a plea bargain arrangement. In child pornography cases, either the defendant was caught to the child porn, or he wasn’t. Witnesses aren’t required, save for procedural and chain-of-custody, simply the evidence. If the evidence is solid, have the defendant either plead to the maximum, or go to trial. We have previously noted how, locally, Fayette County Commonwealth’s Attorney Lou Anna Red Corn has allowed lenient plea bargain arrangements even in murder cases, and while that’s too small a sample, the truth is that it happens everywhere in this country.

Prosecutors love plea bargains! Guaranteed convictions make them look good, and reduce the amount of work they have to do, but we need to hold prosecutors, judges, and probation and parole officials accountable, accountable for the proper punishment of criminals and for the safety of the public.