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Well, what do you know? The Lexington Herald-Leader finally published a mugshot of a dangerous criminal on the loose

I published this tweet at 8:06 AM this morning:

That was true then; I got the mugshot from another source. But now, the Lexington Herald-Leader has done the right thing:

    Teen escapes Lexington juvenile jail. He faces charges in deaths of his mom, sister

    By Jeremy Chisenhall and Rayleigh Deaton | July 19, 2021 | 7:01 AM | Updated: 3:45 PM EDT

    Officers searched Monday for a teen accused of killing his mother and 12-year-old sister after he escaped the Fayette County Juvenile Detention Center, according to Kentucky State Police.

    The escaped inmate was identified as Luke Craig, 16, according to state police. Craig was charged in September with murdering 33-year-old Tefani Noe and 12-year-old Brooke Goggin in Anderson County, Sgt. Bernis Napier told the Herald-Leader Monday. Noe was Craig’s mother and Brooke was his younger sister, according to family obituaries.

    Craig is considered “dangerous and a threat to public safety,” state police said.

There’s more at the original.

When I found the article, earlier this morning, then dated at 7:01 AM, no mugshot was included, even though several other local news sites had it. Checking the Herald-Leader’s website at 3:48 PM, I saw that the mugshot had been added. The article was last updated around 3:45 PM, but I do not know if that was when the mugshot was added. But, better late than never; the newspaper has done the right thing.

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If the news doesn’t fit Teh Narrative, the left try to ignore it to death.

At some point, people have to admit that Amanda Marcotte is simply not a serious writer. Now, it could be said that I am not, either, given that no one is paying me to write, and I certainly do not have her audience, but for a political writer, living in Philadelphia, to not have mentioned — did she even notice? — that her adopted hometown had just hit, and then quickly passed, 300 homicides for the year, seems pretty unusual. Heck, even The Philadelphia Inquirer noticed! The image to the right, on which you can click to enlarge, is her Salon article archive, and, two days short of half a year after President Trump left office, it’s pretty much all Donald Trump, all the time.

But, her pain is understandable, because it has been shared by so many other leftist writers. The COVID-19 restrictions, on which so many on the left blamed the surge in homicides, are now almost all in the past, and the evil reich-wing Mr Trump is out of office. The Democrats control the White House, the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate. In Pennsylvania, the Governor is a Democrat, as is the Mayor of Philadelphia, as is the City Council, and as is the city’s District Attorney, a man who greatly resists “mass incarceration,” and is so soft-on-crime that it ought to embarrass those who are soft-on-crime. The city’s only serious newspaper is an “anti-racist news organization,” and, let’s face it, virtually every liberal municipal policy imaginable has already been put into force in the City of Brotherly Love.

And yet, and yet, the good people of Philadelphia continue to shoot each other at a prodigious rate. At least 303 murders through 198 days yields a homicide rate of 1.5303 per day, and that works out to 558 or 559 (558.56, to be exact, but you can’t kill half a person) projected homicides for 2021. The record is 500 set in the crack cocaine wars of 1990, with last year’s 499 taking second place.

With all of the liberal policies that one could reasonably imagine being enacted, being in force, in Philadelphia, Miss Marcotte’s fellow city residents are still gunning each other down at appalling rates.

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain: Mindless carnage continues in Chicago

The Windy City has seen more total murders. The Chicago Tribune listed 364 homicides as of July 6th, while the Chicago Sun-Times listed 33 more people bleeding out their life’s blood in the city streets between July 7th and July 17th. That’s 397 homicides in 198 days, 2.0051 per day, on pace for 732 for the year. Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s very liberal policies, combined with the completely Democrat controlled state government, don’t seem to have helped much.

However, if Chicago has seen more homicides than Philadelphia, with a population of 2,679,080, Chicago is 68% bigger than Philly, with 1,591,034 souls. Using the projected killings, Chicago projects to a homicide rate of 27.32 per 100,000 population, while Philly basically says, “Hold my beer!” 558 projected murders divided by 15.79 yields a homicide rate of 35.34 per 100,000!

But, pointing that out doesn’t fit Teh Narrative[1]Not a typo: “Teh Narrative” was intentional. for the left, does it?

So, what is Teh Narrative? That this is a gun control issue, that it’s all about too many guns available, and so we must restrict the rights of law abiding citizens, as though the gang bangers are going to obey such laws.

But, if they tell the truth, that this isn’t a gun control problem, but a cultural problem, a specific cultural problem, virtually everything the left say about ‘racial justice’ and ‘systemic racism’ just falls apart.

References

References
↑1 Not a typo: “Teh Narrative” was intentional.
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Oops! Amanda Marcotte jumps the gun . . . again!

For the lovely Amanda Marcotte, transplanted Texan to Brooklyn to South Philadelphia, jumping the gun is simply de rigueur!

    Great work, useful idiots of the media: Most Americans buy the unsubstantiated “lab leak” theory

    Rapid spread of lab-leak theory shows the right is still browbeating the media into spreading misinformation

    By Amanda Marcotte | July 9, 2021 | 1:00 PM EDT

    Here’s most important thing to understand about the idea that COVID-19 originated in a Chinese lab: It’s not very likely, and most of the science still points toward natural origins, meaning random transmission from an animal species. As with Saddam Hussein’s mythical “weapons of mass destruction,” which led to the Iraq War, evidence for the “lab leak” theory is mostly right-wing wishful thinking, tied to a couple of thin pieces of not-really-evidence, and held together with the duct tape of speculation. Meanwhile, evidence for a natural origin, while far from complete, is scientifically sound and fits with everything that’s currently known about the evolution of coronaviruses. When you really dig into the competing theories, it becomes clear that while “lab leak” makes for a good TV plot, there’s not much else going for it. The theory of animal-to-human transmission, while less dramatic and perhaps less emotionally satisfying, is the likelier one.

    Yet we now have a Politico-Harvard poll released Friday morning that shows Americans are “almost twice as likely to say the virus was the result of a lab leak in China than human contact with an infected animal.” And while the lab-leak theory has been hyped by Trump apologists looking to distract from the ex-president’s massive mishandling of the pandemic, the buy-in for this unlikely theory is not particularly partisan. Politico reports that “59 percent of Republicans and 52 percent of Democrats” believe the lab-leak narrative, while only 28 percent said the virus came “from an infected animal.” This is a dramatic change from March 2020, when only 29% of Americans — basically far-right authoritarians — endorsed the lab-leak theory.

There’s more at the original, and it’s not behind a paywall. Skipping a few paragraphs, Miss Marcotte blames her usual suspects: evil reich wing Republicans:

    It wasn’t evidence that changed people’s minds. It was irresponsible media hype of the “lab leak” theory, brought on by a major push from right-wing conspiracy theorists, and also some gullible pundits and journalists who let themselves be used by the right.

Oops!

    Senior Biden officials finding that Covid lab leak theory as credible as natural origins explanation

    By Natasha Bertrand, Pamela Brown, Katie Bo Williams and Zachary Cohen, CNN | Updated 6:18 PM ET | Friday, July 16, 2021

    Washington (CNN)Senior Biden administration officials overseeing an intelligence review into the origins of the coronavirus now believe the theory that the virus accidentally escaped from a lab in Wuhan is at least as credible as the possibility that it emerged naturally in the wild — a dramatic shift from a year ago, when Democrats publicly downplayed the so-called lab leak theory.

    Still, more than halfway into President Joe Biden’s renewed 90-day push to find answers, the intelligence community remains firmly divided over whether the virus leaked from the Wuhan lab or jumped naturally from animals to humans in the wild, multiple sources familiar with the probe told CNN.

    Little new evidence has emerged to move the needle in one direction or another, these people said. But the fact that the lab leak theory is being seriously considered by top Biden officials is noteworthy and comes amid a growing openness to the idea even though most scientists who study coronaviruses and who have investigated the origins of the pandemic say the evidence strongly supports a natural origin.

    Current intelligence reinforces the belief that the virus most likely originated naturally, from animal-human contact and was not deliberately engineered, the sources said. But that does not preclude the possibility that the virus was the result of an accidental leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where coronavirus research was being conducted on bats — although many scientists familiar with the research say such a leak is unlikely.

I never knew that President Biden and his Administration were vulnerable to “a major push from right-wing conspiracy theorists.” 🙂

One of us thinks that perhaps, just perhaps, Miss Marcotte is herself an entire conspiracy theory, all wrapped up in her one little head.

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The racism of white liberals has made itself clear

“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” — Chief Justice John Roberts, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1

We have previously noted the apparently acceptable racial discrimination against Asians in the United States. From The Wall Street Journal:

    A PTA Purge of Asians

    America’s top public high school shows us what discrimination looks like today.

    By William McGurn | July 12, 2021 6:14 pm ET

    When Jeannie C. Riley released “Harper Valley P.T.A.” in 1968, her hit single mocked a parent-teacher association for telling a school mom she was wearing her dresses way too high. Today the real-life sequel is playing out at the Virginia Parent Teacher Association and its chapter at a high-performing public school in Fairfax County. This time, however, parents are complaining about the PTA—that it’s in cahoots with those watering down entrance standards with the aim of reducing the school’s Asian-American population.

    Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology is a school for gifted students ranked No. 1 among all public high schools nationwide by U.S. News & World Report. In December the county school board changed its admissions process, replacing a rigorous, race-blind entrance exam with a “holistic” (read: subjective) formula that includes grades but also puts caps on the number of students each middle school could send to TJ—a de facto limit on middle schools with high numbers of Asian-American students.

    The desired result has been achieved. The percentage of Asian-Americans admitted to TJ dropped to 54% this year from 73% last year. Whites, blacks and Latinos all saw their numbers go up. No doubt this is only the beginning.

Were such a program installed to lower the percentage of blacks or Hispanics at a selective high school, the left would be screaming bloody murder. But when it punishes a high-achieving group, even a minority one, you can see what has happened: equality of opportunity has been replaced with “equity,” a ‘progressive’ shorthand for equality of results. I’d really like to just quote the entire OpEd piece, but that’s plagiarism, and a violation of Fair Use standards. Read the entire thing, if you can. Sadly, about half of the article is behind the subscriber paywall.

    One of these coalition candidates is Harry Jackson, a retired Navy officer. In a March 10 piece for The Washington Post, he explained his position this way: “When I see the effort to water down the admissions standards to TJ — and let’s be clear, that effort is led by paternalistic White liberals who are determined to ‘help’ minority students at any cost — I see it for what it is: a tacit admission that they don’t think Black and Hispanic students have what it takes to compete on merit.”

It’s more than just that. Not only do the white liberals not think that black and Hispanic students “have what it takes to compete on merit,” but they dismiss the achievements of students of Asian ethnicity as “white adjacent.”

    Asra Nomani is a Bombay-born newswoman who previously worked as a reporter for this newspaper. She is also the mother of a recent TJ grad, a member of the local PTA and a co-founder of the Coalition for TJ. She describes what’s happening this way:

    “The mostly white Virginia PTA is trying to hijack our all-minority TJ victory because we are an inconvenient minority for them. The woke warriors are so afraid of our mostly immigrant, mostly Asian parents because we defy their narrative of oppressed minorities in a racist America. We’re unapologetic, and that scares them so much that they don’t even realize how they are now perpetrators of a systemic racism and tyranny they claim to oppose.”

It’s more than that. For the #woke to accept the notion that Americans of Asian descent might have achieved the success that they have due to their hard work — this Washington Post article tries to debunk that idea — then the left would have to accept the idea that behavior does influence success, and the lack of it, and that would open the door to the horrible, horrible notion that less successful groups are less successful due to their own behavior.

    It’s certainly not bringing out the best in people who pride themselves on racial sensitivity, Virginia’s education secretary, Atif Qarni, likened Asian-American kids taking test preparation to athletes taking illegal performance-enhancing drugs.

Really? So parents trying to do the best thing for their children, such as giving them the opportunity to practice for admissions tests, is a terrible, terrible thing, but parents who might send their kids to, say, a basketball camp, to try to improve skills to make their high school teams, that’s OK?

You know, that’s what parents do: they try to make life easier for their children, they try to give their kids the best start on life that they can. Isn’t that what sending their children to school is all about in the first place?

William McGurn’s closing paragraph, however, pretty much misses the boat:

    Today’s targeting of successful Asian-American kids lacks the crudity of a Jim Crow lunch counter or a whites-only drinking fountain. But it is no less ugly — and no less racially discriminatory — for being more genteel.

That’s just it: what the ‘progressives’ are doing today does not lack crudity, and is not more genteel. It’s obvious, it’s blatant, it’s visible to anyone with the eyes to see . . . and the willingness to look.

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300

One of the movies that frequently shows up on television is 300, the very much fictionalized account of King Leonidas and a band of 300 Spartan warriors, at the Battle of Thermopylae, and yeah, I frequently tune in.

Well today in the City of Brotherly Love, the 300th homicide victim lost his life, and the movie’s bloody logo seems pretty appropriate. The Philadelphia Inquirer actually took notice of the milestone:

    Philly just hit 300 killings this year, as its record pace continues

    This is the earliest in the year that the city has even approached 300 killings since at least the early 1990s. And shootings have topped 1,200.

    by Chris Palmer and Mensah M. Dean | July 16, 2021

    Late Thursday night, someone opened fire on a North Philadelphia street and shot three people. One died: the city’s 300th homicide victim of 2021.

    Police did not identify the man who died, and released few details about the crime, which they said happened on the 1800 block of West Susquehanna Avenue around 11:30 p.m. The other victims, authorities said, were a 14-year-old girl shot in the chest and a 24-year-old man struck in the shoulder. Both were hospitalized Friday, the girl in critical condition.

    The fatal shooting meant that the city had reached 300 killings more quickly in a single year than any since at least the 1970s. And it kept Philadelphia on pace to top not only last year’s 499 homicides, but also its all-time record of 500 slayings in a year, set in 1990.

Top the record? How about smash it, smash it to smithereens? Assuming the 300th killing is counted among yesterday’s totals — it wasn’t as of the 8:00 AM revision by the Philadelphia Police Department — that’s 1.5306 homicides per day in Philadelphia, on pace for 559 for the entire year.

    Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw said in a statement that “the brazenness with which these assaults are carried out is appalling. The lack of regard for human life is affecting innocent bystanders and our children are being caught in the cross fire.”

    Outlaw said that officers were continuing to seize illegal guns in record numbers, and that police remained “laser-focused on enforcing the law while deterring crime,” while pledging that police would continue to seek partnerships with other agencies and community members “to effect long-term and sustainable change.”

Further down:

    Leroy Muhammad, an activist with the Black Male Community Council,[1]Hyperlink added by DRP; the Inquirer couldn’t be bothered. was among those speaking out Friday. He told those listening that they as community members needed to step up to help stop the violence and help the authorities catch those committing violent acts.

    “We don’t come out here as a follow-up response. We’re out here every day, this is what we do. We’re out in the streets every day and we’re looking for others to come out with us,” Muhammad said. “I woke up this morning, only to find that there had been 300 homicides in Philadelphia. Totally ridiculous. Unacceptable.”

Heaven forfend! It’s almost as though the local community, and the Inquirer, are realizing that the tremendous homicide rate in Philly isn’t a “gun violence” problem, but an inner city black culture issue.[2]Also see: Robert Stacy McCain on The Other McCain: Yet Another Aspiring Rapper Update. When a city has a substantial portion of its teenaged to thirty-something population glamorizing killing their … Continue reading The BMCC website even has a slogan, “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” -James Baldwin, on its main page, and perhaps, just perhaps, a few Philadelphians are actually facing the problem.

Those 300 homicide victims? They weren’t like King Leonidas and the brave Spartans fighting heroically to the death. They have been mostly thugs killed by other thugs, though there have been some innocent victims, primarily among the bystanders.

References

References
↑1 Hyperlink added by DRP; the Inquirer couldn’t be bothered.
↑2 Also see: Robert Stacy McCain on The Other McCain: Yet Another Aspiring Rapper Update. When a city has a substantial portion of its teenaged to thirty-something population glamorizing killing their enemies in rap “music,” perhaps the city leaders shouldn’t be mystified as to why the ‘gangstas’ are shooting other ‘gangstas.’
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Does anyone think that there will be widespread protests over this killing by police?

On October 26, 2020, Walter Wallace, Jr, of Philadelphia, was shot and killed by two Philadelphia Police officers as he advanced on them brandishing a kinfe.

    On October 26, 2020, Walter Wallace Jr., a 27-year-old African-American man, was shot by Philadelphia police officers Sean Matarazzo and Thomas Munz in Cobbs Creek, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The two officers arrived in the area to respond to a domestic dispute. When they arrived, Wallace walked out of his house carrying a knife. The two officers backed away while telling him to drop the knife shortly before they each fired several rounds at Wallace, hitting him in the shoulder and chest. He later died from his wounds in the hospital. Wallace’s family stated that Wallace was having a mental health crisis.

    Wallace’s killing gained attention after a cellphone video of the incident was posted to social media platforms, where it went viral. Protests against the killing occurred throughout Philadelphia in late October. Peaceful protests took place, as well as several which escalated into violence and looting, leading to arrests, injuries to police and protesters, deployment of the Pennsylvania National Guard, and a citywide curfew. . . . .

    On October 26, 2020, police attended three separate times to Wallace’s parents’ house on the 6100 block of Locust Street in the predominantly black neighborhood of Cobbs Creek, Philadelphia. Around 3:45 p.m., during their third arrival, Officers Sean Matarazzo and Thomas Munz came in response to reports of a person screaming and a man assaulting an elderly female. Several 9-1-1 calls were made by Wallace’s sister, brother, and neighbor, telling dispatchers that Wallace was assaulting his parents. Wallace’s sister asked for a medic on the scene as her mother’s blood pressure was rising and her father was feeling faint, also informing the dispatcher that Wallace was on probation and had a criminal record. Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw said the police dispatch prior to the shooting said, “Tell the officers to use caution in responding to this, it’s an ongoing domestic issue going on up there.” It is unknown if the officers were familiar with Wallace prior to their arrival.

    At 3:48 p.m., the responding officers arrived at the house, standing about 15 feet away from the front. An unknown person from inside the house said, “Put the knife down,” three times. Wallace then walked out of his house and onto his porch carrying a knife in his right hand. Both officers drew their guns and yelled for Wallace to “put the knife down” around 11 times. Wallace walked down his front steps and towards the officers. He then turned away from the officers and walked towards the other end of the street. His mother followed him into the street and attempted to grab him before he brushed her aside as officers asked her to move away from Wallace.[15] An unknown woman yelled to the officers that Wallace was “mental” multiple times. Wallace then walked back into the street while Matarazzo and Munz continued to aim their guns at him, repeating for him to “put the knife down”.

    Wallace’s mother told the officers not to shoot him moments before shots were fired. An unknown man said “Get him,” and “Shoot him,” before each officer fired about seven times, with an unknown number of shots hitting Wallace. Wallace’s mother ran to him as he was dying, and yelled at officers, “You killed my son!” The shots hit Wallace in the shoulder and chest. One of the officers placed Wallace in a police vehicle and drove him to the hospital where he was pronounced dead shortly after arriving.

The Usual Suspects spent a couple of weeks rioting in the City of Brotherly Love, even though the police body camera record clearly showed Mr Wallace advancing on the officers. The officers were not equipped with Tasers.

Now we come to this, from the Lexington Herald-Leader:

    KY State Police release name of man killed in Danville officer-involved shooting

    By Rayleigh Deaton | July 16, 2021 10:40 AM | Updated: 1:28 PM EDT

    Shelby Ray Hardin. Photo from his obituary.

    The Kentucky State Police have released the name of the man shot and killed by an officer at a Danville hotel last week.

    According to KSP, 33-year-old Shelby Ray Hardin of Danville was holding his mother hostage at knifepoint at the Danville Super Motel 8 on July 6.

    When Hardin did not comply with officers’ commands to drop the knife and release his mother, Danville police officer Kyle Lyons fired a shot, investigators say.

WLEX-TV had a more detailed report:

    Danville police officers responded to a domestic disturbance in a Super 8 Motel on July 6. Once the officers arrived they encountered 33-year-old Shelby Ray Hardin, who was holding his mother hostage at knifepoint.

    Officers gave Hardin several loud verbal warnings to drop the knife and release his mother, but he ignored the officer’s instructions.

    Officer Kyle Lyons then shot at Hardin with his agency-issued gun. Hardin was pronounced dead at the scene by the Boyle County Coroner.

In both the cases of Mr Wallace in Philadelphia, and Mr Hardin in Danville, we had a suspect armed with a knife and in position to kill someone. yet, for some unknown reason, I have yet to hear of any demonstrations of riots over the police shooting of Mr Hardin. I wonder why that is.

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The Lexington Herald-Leader once again hides a mugshot, this time of a convicted child pornographer.

In our continuing coverage to tell you what the Lexington Herald-Leader will not, we note that, once again, the newspaper won’t show you what a convicted criminal looks like:

    He used app to get images from 7-year-old. Central Kentucky man gets long sentence.

    By Rayleigh Deaton | July 16, 2021 | 10:04 AM EDT

    A Berea man was sentenced to nearly 18 years in federal prison for using a minor to produce child pornography.

    According to the U.S. attorney’s office, in May 2020, 33-year-old Bradley Scott Helton communicated with a 7-year-old via an app called “Kiss Kiss: Spin the Bottle.” Helton’s plea agreement said he sent the victim sexual videos and pictures and requested the victim send sexual videos in return.

Bradley Helton

There’s more at the original. What wasn’t in the original was Mr Helton’s mugshot. That was in WTVQ-TV’s report:

    FRANKFORT, Ky. (WTVQ) – A Berea, Ky., man,[1]Correction: Mr Helton may be a male, but he is certainly not a man, something which I expect will be made very clear to him in prison. Bradley Scott Helton, 33, was sentenced Thursday to 214 months in federal prison, by U.S. District Judge Gregory VanTatenhove, for using a minor to produce child pornography.

    According to Helton’s plea agreement, on May 16, 2020, he communicated with a 7-year-old victim, via an app called “Kiss Kiss: Spin the Bottle,” according to federal prosecutors.

    Helton admitted to chatting with the victim, sending the victim sexual videos and pictures, and requesting the victim send sexual videos in return, according to court records.

    Helton admitted he persuaded and used the 7-year-old victim to engage in sexually explicit conduct, for the purpose of producing a visual depiction of that conduct, prosecutors said.

    He further admitted the images traveled in interstate commerce when the victim, who was in Texas, sent them to him, in Kentucky, via the app.

    Helton pleaded guilty in March 2021.

    Under federal law, Helton must serve 85 percent of his prison sentence and will be under the supervision of the U.S. Probation Office for 25 years, following his release from prison.

214 months times 0.85 = 181.9 month, or 15 years and 2 months. Mr Helton could get out of prison when he is still only 48 years old.

Why, I have to ask, did the Herald-Leader not publish Mr Helton’s mugshot? He is not, after all, someone simply accused of a crime and who might eventually be acquitted, but a man male who has admitted his guilt, a convicted child pornographer.

Mr Helton has forfeited all of his privacy rights, and what responsible journalists used to claim was the public’s right to know ought to take precedence.[2]I cannot blame Rayleigh Deaton, the article author, in that she’s an intern, not a Herald-Leader staff writer. She is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the Kentucky Kernel, the University of … Continue reading

References

References
↑1 Correction: Mr Helton may be a male, but he is certainly not a man, something which I expect will be made very clear to him in prison.
↑2 I cannot blame Rayleigh Deaton, the article author, in that she’s an intern, not a Herald-Leader staff writer. She is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the Kentucky Kernel, the University of Kentucky’s student newspaper, for which I wrote just a few years after Johannes Gutenberg invented the movable type printing press.
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They can’t handle the truth!

The Friday morning report from the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page shows the city on the edge of another milestone: with 299 souls sent early to their eternal rewards, the 300th murder will almost certainly happen sometime today, but the PPD only updates the site on weekdays; we will (probably) not get the totals until Monday morning. As of 11:59 PM EDT on Thursday, the city was seeing 1.5255 homicides per day, on pace for 557 for 2021, a number which is actually down slightly.

We have previously noted how some residents in Philadelphia have, in effect, put themselves in jail, by barring up their row homes to protect themselves from the bad guys who roam their streets. The image to the right, which the reader can enlarge by clicking on it, shows four row homes, out of six, in which the residents have caged themselves in at night.

Now comes Jabari K. Jones, the President of the West Philadelphia Corridor Collaborative, telling us of the effect that “gun violence” is having upon black business owners in the City of Brotherly Love:

    West Philly business owners have lost faith in the City to keep them safe

    I have spoken to countless West Philadelphia business owners who would love to be open longer each day, but they choose to close at nightfall because they have no confidence they will be safe.

    by Jabari Jones | July 14, 2021 | 9:00 AM EDT

    Visit one of our historic commercial corridors in West Philadelphia or any predominantly diverse community after sundown, and the sight is the same: silver shutter gates, dark storefronts, and empty businesses that have closed for the day.

    Now, on that same day, visit Center City after dark. Bars and restaurants are thriving, people of all ages stroll by storefronts, and everyone is open for business.

    The reason for the difference? Public safety.

    I have spoken to countless West Philadelphia business owners who would love to be open longer each day, but they choose to close at nightfall because they have no confidence in the City of Philadelphia to keep them or their patrons safe from the rising tide of gun violence.

    In the last two months, a Dunkin’ Donuts manager in North Philly was murdered as she was opening the store at dawn, and West Philadelphia fashion designer Sircarr Johnson, Jr. was shot and killed when his cookout was sprayed with over 100 rounds.

    According to the Pew Charitable Trust, only 2.5% of Philly businesses have Black owners, even though Black people represent nearly 44% of city residents. But data from the West Philadelphia Corridor Collaborative show that, on certain corridors in West Philly, Black people own a majority of businesses. A stroll through Center City, however, shows mostly larger corporate stores and white-owned businesses. For years, business and city officials have studied why the city’s racial demographics aren’t reflected in business ownership, and why BIPOC-owned businesses fail at higher rates.

There’s more at the original, and I’d really like to republish it all, but that would be plagiarism, and exceed Title 17 U.S.C., §107 “Fair use” standards. Briefly, Mr Jones tells the reader that “white-owned businesses” in Center City have several more hours per day in which they can be open, meaning several more hours per day in which they can sell their goods and services, and make money. I’d encourage people to follow the link and read the whole thing.

Nevertheless, Mr Jones still danced around the real issue. While pointing out that the economic damage was heavily skewed to black-owned businesses, in heavily black neighborhoods, he could not bring himself to point out that the city’s “gun violence” problem is a black “gun violence” problem. The black shooters aren’t just wounding and killing people, but black-owned businesses as well.

The next day came Inquirer columnist Will Bunch, with a similar sense of denial of reality:

    There’s nothing more progressive than stopping city kids from getting shot

    Progressives need to understand what’s behind rising city homicides and develop plans to reduce shootings — without yesterday’s police abuses.

    by Will Bunch | July 15, 2021

    The easiest part of writing this column was the beginning — finding the most up-to-date examples of the gun violence in Philadelphia that has steadily risen since the start of the pandemic and has lately spiked again, in the long hot summer of 2021.

    Just hours earlier — at 1 a.m. on an unseasonably muggy Thursday morning — a man bounded onto SEPTA’s Nite Owl bus on Broad Street near Chestnut, in the beating heart of Center City, and started shooting, critically wounding a 29-year-old man and utterly terrifying the 15 other passengers onboard. Just a few hours earlier, a car chase in the city’s Logan section had ended with a gunman from one car shooting and wounding two teenagers, aged 19 and just 14, from the other car after it had crashed into an SUV with four occupants. At roughly the same time in West Philadelphia, an unrelated shooting wounded a 15-year-old and 13-year-old.

    Go back to the night before, or the night before that, and you’ll find similarly grim stories: Philadelphia teenagers — their names, along with their stories and their humanity, rarely identified — wounded or even killed by the latest burst of gunfire. Of the more than 1,200 people shot so far in Philadelphia in a year that’s barely half over, more than 100 have been children. With 297 people murdered so far, there’s a more than decent chance that the so-called City of Brotherly Love will pass its all-time homicide record of 500 back in 1990. This is a human-rights crisis in America’s sixth-largest — and founding — city.

    And yet, as many conservatives and mainstream-media contrarian types have been so quick to point out, rising murder rates — occurring right now in most American big cities — haven’t been a front-burner for the political left in 2021. Indeed, there’s been a habit, at least on social media, of tsk-tsking the problem by pointing to “if it bleeds, it leads” media sensationalism (a real thing) or noting that overall crime rates, including the violent crime category, haven’t really spiked and remain near historical lows. This seems prompted by fears that making urban gun violence a top-tier issue will both hurt the movement against social injustices like police brutality and mass incarceration, and also distract from other issues on the progressive to-do list.

I have to give Mr Bunch credit here: whether he realized it or not, he told the truth: many credentialed media sources fear telling the truth, because the truth goes against the liberal narrative. We have previously noted, many times, that the Inquirer doesn’t bother to report on murders in Philadelphia unless the victim is an innocent, like Christine Lupo, a “somebody,” like a local high school basketball player, or a cute little white girl, like the 2,782 site search results for Rian Thal. For the Inquirer to actually tell the truth would be for that publisher-directed “anti-racist news organization” to undermine its political direction.

Mr Bunch called “mass incarceration” a “social injustice,” yet had Delaware Superior Court Judge Vivian L. Medinilla been perhaps a little less concerned with “mass incarceration,” Christine Lugo and several other people in Philly and New Castle County, Delaware would almost certainly still be alive today. Mr Jones, in his column, had noted Jovaun Patterson was given a sweetheart plea deal, dropping an attempted murder charge, for shooting and permanently crippling a West Philly shop owner, 3½ to 10 years,[1]Perhaps they should be satisfied with what they got, given that, in 8,500 Philadelphia shootings since 2015, suspects have been charged in 1 out of 5 cases and convicted in just 9%. by District Attorney Larry Krasner, whom the Inquirer incredibly endorsed for re-election. Mr Bunch, and in part Mr Jones, didn’t want to see the one program which actually does reduce shootings and killings: keeping the bad guys locked up, for as long as the law allows.

Let’s tell the truth here: in a city that is only 42.13% black, according to the Philadelphia Shooting Victims Dashboard, 75.53% of all shooting victims are black males, and another 6.72% are black females; 82.25% of all victims are black. Just 4.06% are white males, with 0.86% being white women.

If the problem is the availability of firearms, as the Inquirer so often tells us, why aren’t white people, 40.66% of the city’s population, shooting and killing each other at rates similar to blacks?

If you don’t tell the truth to yourself about the problem, you can never solve the problem! And the truth is that there is something in the urban black culture in the City of Brotherly Love — and let’s be honest here, in other large cities as well — which tells young black men that shooting each other is acceptable behavior.[2]The Inquirer has reported that, “Nearly 94% of the 10,000 people shot since 2015 were Black or brown, according to the city’s data. Three-quarters of the victims were Black males.” There’s … Continue reading The killing of Sircarr Johnson, Jr, which the Inquirer did cover because he was a ‘somebody,’ had the shooters fire off more than 100 rounds toward a crowd at a cook-out, about as indiscriminate a killing action as one can imagine.

The Inquirer doesn’t report the truth because the #woke[3]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 there can’t handle the truth.

References

References
↑1 Perhaps they should be satisfied with what they got, given that, in 8,500 Philadelphia shootings since 2015, suspects have been charged in 1 out of 5 cases and convicted in just 9%.
↑2 The Inquirer has reported that, “Nearly 94% of the 10,000 people shot since 2015 were Black or brown, according to the city’s data. Three-quarters of the victims were Black males.” There’s something wryly amusing that the Inquirer follows the Associated Press stylebook change, in which the AP noted that they would capitalize “black” in reference to race, but not “white,” and in this case, the writers capitalized “black” but not “brown”. As per our stylebook, we do not capitalize ‘colors’ when referring to race.
↑3 From Wikipedia:

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

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.
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Kathleen Sebelius advocates authoritarian controls; the credentialed media try to ignore it to death

Kathleen Sebelius was Secretary of Health and Human Services during the previous Democratic administration, but it seems that she has taken her lessons not from Barack Hussein Obama but Xi Jinping. First, from The Wall Street Journal:

    Get Vaxxed or Stay Home, Some Local Chinese Governments Say

    Some areas are planning to restrict people from public venues unless they get shots, sparking criticism

    By Chao Deng | Updated: July 15, 2021 | 7:17 AM ET

    Several local governments in China are planning to bar residents who haven’t been vaccinated against Covid-19 from accessing public venues, stirring controversy as the country makes a push for herd immunity.

    In recent days, a dozen counties and cities in the eastern provinces of Zhejiang, Fujian and Jiangxi set late-August deadlines for people 18 years or older to complete a two-shot vaccine regimen, according to similarly worded online statements. Many of them also set dates in late July by which unvaccinated people would be barred from entering schools, libraries, prisons, nursing homes and inpatient facilities at hospitals without a valid medical exemption.

    Some of the localities attributed their new policies to “national, provincial and municipal arrangements,” without explaining whether they received a decree from the central government.

    China is dealing with sporadic outbreaks of Covid-19 and authorities have been offering homegrown vaccines free of charge since last December.

    The government notices have sparked online pushback from some Chinese and triggered a debate—as in the U.S. and elsewhere—about whether people should be required to present proof of inoculation to travel, work or undertake other routine activities outside their home.

There’s more at the original.

Mrs Sebelius, previously the Governor of Kansas, apparently loves the way the Chinese Communists do things. From Breitbart, via The Pirate’s Cove:

Mrs Sebelius stated:

    Sebelius said, “We’re in a situation where we have a wildly effective vaccine, multiple choices, lots available, free of charge, and we have folks who are just saying I won’t do it. I think that it’s time to say to those folks, it’s fine if you don’t choose to get vaccinated. You may not come to work. You may not have access to a situation where you’re going to put my grandchildren in jeopardy. Where you might kill them, or you might put them in a situation where they’re going to carry the virus to someone in a high-risk position.”

    That’s, I think the point where we are, is freedom is one thing, but freedom when you harm others like secondhand smoke and issues that we’ve dealt with very clearly in the past you can’t drive drunk. You can drink, but you can’t drive drunk because you can injure other people. You can’t smoke inside of a public place where you can give cancer to someone else in spite of their never having been a smoker.

    So I think we’re reaching that point in the United States where those of us who are vaccinated, I want to take off my mask. I want to be able to live my life with vaccination, and right now, I’m being impinged on by people who say I don’t want to get vaccinated. It’s fine. I want them to maybe have a limitation on where they can go and who they can possibly infect.

You know what’s interesting? Breitbart is a definitely conservative site, and I like to cite liberal sources to prevent complaints by the left that my sources are biased, so I made a Google search for Mrs Sebelius’ first sentence. As you can see from the screen capture at the right, on which you can click to enlarge to make it more readable, all I found were conservative sources and individual blogs. Given that Breitbart had a video of the interview embedded, one which has two annoying commercials in it and one I cannot embed, the story is confirmed, but, oddly enough, the credentialed media seem loath to report it. Site searches for Sebelius on The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Philadelphia Inquirer yielded zero returns of this. Even a site search of CNN, where the interview was broadcast, yielded only one article, Young children will pay the price if enough US adults don’t get vaccinated against Covid-19, expert says, in which Mrs Sebelius’ statement is buried down in the 19th paragraph.

The credentialed media absotively, posilutely do not want such a totalitarian statement from a former Secretary of Health and Human Services to get much publicity, and so the story is being quietly buried, quietly ignored to death. Such is apparently not news that is fit to print! But we can be certain of one thing: if President Biden proposed such a thing, the left would certainly go along with it, because the left love them some totalitarian controls!

“Democracy Dies in Darkness,” The Washington Post has as its masthead tagline. Yet it seems that a former Democratic Secretary of Health and Human Services’ advocacy of authoritarian controls is news the editors of the Post want to keep in darkness.

It’s interesting that the Wikipedia biography for Mrs Sebelius states, “She is strongly pro-choice,” but it seems that, like so many others on the left, she is pro-choice on exactly one thing.

It should be noted that I am, and have previously stated, that I have been vaccinated against COVID-19. That was my personal choice, a choice I took freely, and my decision is the one I think others should take. But I also believe that people have the right to decide that for themselves, and that the government ought not to have any authority to penalize or punish them if they choose differently than I have.