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Killadelphia: Is it too early to start talking about trends in city homicides? It's not just Philadelphians killing each other; it's The Philadelphia Inquirer committing suicide.

I have (mostly) resisted the math when it comes to killings in the City of Brotherly Love so far this year, because it seemed too early in the year to draw conclusions based upon the numbers. January and February being winter months, when murders are normally less probable, seemed to me to be poorer indicators than they might be, but the city has reached early numbers which are staggering.

As of 11:59 PM EST on Monday, February 28th, the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page reported that there had been 84 homicides in the city, compared to 77 on the same date in 2021, and 60 in 2020. There had also been 60 murders as of February 28th in 2007.

That’s where the numbers start to get dicey: in 2007, Philadelphia finished the year with 391 homicides, while 2020 saw 499. In 2007, 15.35% of the year’s total killings were by the end of February, while in 2020, it was only 12.02%. 2007 was a reasonably normal year, while 2020 saw the beginning of the COVID-19 panicdemic pandemic and the death of the drug-addled convicted felon George Floyd in a legitimate arrest that went wrong, leading to the summer of fire and hate. In 2021, 13.70% of city homicides had been committed by February 28th, very close to the midway point between the rates in 2007 and 2020.

The chart at the right shows the percentages of the murders in the city as of February 28th by year, for every year since 2007, and they are all over the board. 2011 and 2014 saw over 18% of the homicides as having been committed by that date, while 2010, 2016, and 2020 saw percentages in the 12 to 13% range. The average works out to 14.52% as of the end of February.

If the average holds true, Philadelphia is on pace for 578.52 homicides in 2022, which would break last year’s all-time record of 562 by a 2.85% margin (for 578 murders) to 3.02% (for 579). If 2020’s percentage, the lowest on the chart, is the metric, it would be 698.84 killings, 613.14% if last year’s percentage turned out to be the number, but ‘only’ 448.96 if the highest percentage on the chart, 2011’s 18.71%. 449 homicides would still put 2022 into 5th place since records were kept beginning in 1960.

For 2022 to see only 400 murders, a full 21.00% would have had to already have occurred, a number far higher than anything in the historical record, and for the final number to be 500, 16.80% of the homicides would have already happened.

I admit it: I can be a numbers geek at times, and numbers tell part of the story, but not the whole thing. And with three homicides just yesterday, as of 9:30 AM EST on Tuesday, March 1st, there isn’t a single mention of any of the three homicides that occurred yesterday in the city on either the main page or the crime and justice page of The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website. To the editors of the Inquirer, which used to call itself a “Public Ledger” and “An Independent Newspaper for All the People.”

Instead, what we have is an “anti-racist news organization,” one which seems to be dedicated to reporting only those stories which cannot be seen as reflecting poorly on any minority group. The “public ledger” function has clearly gone, as the newspaper’s website main page maintains stories from several days ago, but can’t bring itself to mention that three murders occurred in the city yesterday.

Why? The Inquirer is very, very good at covering stories in which the victim was clearly an ‘innocent,’ a ‘somebody,’ or, most importantly, a cute little white girl. When Samuel Sean Collington, a Temple University student approaching graduation was murdered. Mr Collington was a white victim, allegedly by a black juvenile in a botched robbery. On December 2, 2021, the Inquirer published 14 photographs from a vigil for Mr Collington, along with another story about him. Five separate stories about the case of a murdered white guy. The newspaper even broke precedent when it came to Mr Collington’s murder by including the name of the juvenile suspect in the case, and delving into his previous record.

Oh, it’s not as though the Inquirer doesn’t publish stories about black victims, at least when it comes to black victims who are ‘innocents’. The murder of Samir Jefferson merited two stories, and four stories about the killing of 13-year-old Marcus Stokes.[1]I did note my suspicion that young Mr Stokes might not have been quite the innocent the Inquirer, and writer Anna Orso, made him out to be. A story is merited if the victim was a local high school basketball star, and cute little white girls killed get tremendous coverage: a search of the newspaper’s website for Rian Thal returned 4855 results! But for the vast majority of black victims, Inquirer coverage is a couple paragraphs, mostly in the late evening, and which have disappeared from the main page of the newspaper’s website by morning, if even that much.

Why? it’s simple: reporting about black bad guys getting killed by other black bad guys, in the words of the Sacramento Bee, “perpetuat(es) stereotypes about who commits crime in our community.” In her “apology to black Philadelphians and journalists,” publisher Elizabeth ‘Lisa’ Hughes did not use those specific words, but the effect has been the same: no reporting of stories which might tell readers what they already know: that the vast majority of the murder victims, and their killers, in the City of Brotherly Love are black males who have been involved in the gang or criminal lifestyle.

This is what happens when the Inquirer, the third oldest continuously published daily newspaper in the country, goes from being a “public ledger” to worrying about being a “white newspaper” in a “black city.”

Philadelphia isn’t even a “black city.” The 2020 census found that just 38.3% of the city’s population were non-Hispanic black, and Hispanics, who can be either black or white, made up 14.9%. Between non-Hispanic whites, 34.3%, Asians, 8.3%, and “other groups,” 4.3%, the city is 46.9% non-black, and it doesn’t take a terribly large percentage of the Hispanic population being white to get the city to majority non-black. The non-Hispanic white population of the city have certainly declined, but they are hardly gone.

Those are just numbers, but that the newspaper called Philadelphia a “black city” underscores the problem; though highly segregated by neighborhood, Philly overall has a very ‘diverse’ — and I have come to hate that word — population. Today, by Miss Hughes order, the “Independent Newspaper for All the People” has become a newspaper for the “black city” that Philly really isn’t. In a time in which Philadelphia has one of the highest poverty rates in the nation, and newspaper circulation is falling, how much sense does it make to tell half or more of the city’s population not to bother to subscribe?

Of course, the Inquirer isn’t just a Philadelphia newspaper; it serves the suburbs in a fairly large metropolitan area, and that area is very much majority white:


It seems as though Miss Hughes has told about 80% of the potential metropolitan area subscribers not to bother; the newspaper isn’t for them.

I am a big fan of newspapers, having been a paper boy starting in junior high school, delivering the Lexington Herald and Lexington Leader in my hometown of Mt Sterling, Kentucky. I used to, before retirement, pick up the dead trees edition of the Inquirer to take to the plant every day before work when I lived in the Keystone State, and I’m a digital subscriber even today, now that I have retired back to my home state. Being mostly deaf now, print media is important to me. And something I very much regret is seeing what was once one of the nation’s premier newspapers not only having gone downhill in terms of circulation — something happening to almost every print newspaper these days — but seemingly committing suicide by its editorial policies.

References

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The future of journalism? Today's journalism students will be tomorrow's reporters and editors

I have frequently referred to journolism, which some might think is a misspelled. The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity; I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.

Now, thanks to a tweet from David Huber, an editor and writer at The College Fix, I found this, from the Columbia University student newspaper, the Columbia Daily Spectator:

Letter from the Editor: Why we published op-eds arguing against the mask mandate on campus

by Senem Yurdakul, Editorial Page Editor | Monday, February 28, 2022 | 2:02 AM EST

On February 8, we published a piece titled “Why can’t we move on from COVID-19?” The decision to publish the piece came after days of conversations among our staff on public discourse, freedom of speech, and our responsibility to our community.

Our mission at the Opinion section of Spectator is to reflect and direct campus and community discourse. But what does that even mean?

Reflecting campus discourse means being present in the spaces where discourse arises and evolves. It means being members of different student organizations, participating in class discussions, and listening to the people around us when they share their experiences as members of the Columbia community. It means avidly reading Columbia Confessions to find the opinions students might not otherwise find acceptable to voice out loud or with their names attached. It means witnessing the contemporary politics of our campus unfold around us, choosing not to remain bystanders, and bringing what we see into public dialogue.

It also means being aware that campus discourse resumes in our absence and acknowledging that there are spaces that we do not have access to, narratives that aren’t familiar to us, and stories that aren’t ours to tell. It is about coming to the office for all staff meetings and asking “Whose voices are we missing?” It is about knowing that just because certain opinions are not articulated in public, it does not mean that they are absent from campus discourse.

Heaven forfend! A student, at Columbia University, a liberal Ivy League school in liberal New York City, noting that there are people other than 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 have opinions that should be noted? As I responded to Mr Huber, “Not to worry: when they graduate and go to work for the @PhillyInquirer, they’ll find out that dissenting opinions are wholly unwelcome by editor Gabriel @escobarinquirer, publisher Lisa Hughes, and the rest of the #woke staff.”

But there’s more: Miss Yurdakul recognized that there are “certain opinions”, held by Columbia students, which are “not articulated in public.” Translation: expressing those opinions in public will result in negative consequences for those who speak them; that’s why sixteen University of Pennsylvania women’s swim team members had to keep their identities concealed. Of course, further down, Miss Yurdakul states that they “draw strict lines between hate speech and free speech,” so it’s entirely possible that, were the UPenn situation part of Columbia’s, those expressing the opinion that Will Thomas should not be allowed to compete athletically as a woman might be rejected.[2]A site search for “Lia Thomas” turned up only one story about Mr Thomas’ participation in the Ivy League championships, and offered no opinions. The article did note the controversy … Continue reading

When we received Gabe Weintraub and Matt Keating’s pieces in our inbox, it was a clear indication to us that there is a present and ongoing discussion on masks within the student body. To have ignored these pieces because of their controversial takes would have been in direct defiance of our mission to reflect campus conversations. To have ignored the letters to the editor we have received by Ned Latham and Leslie A. Zukor in response to Weintraub and Keating’s pieces would have undermined our commitment to fair representation.

Miss Yurdakul put it out there: there is clearly a serious disagreement on Columbia’s campus about the mask mandates, but it is a debate which does not raise “hate speech” questions.

When, there is a second layer of our mission: directing campus discourse. When we publish an op-ed, letter to the editor, or column, we provide a platform for the writer’s story, voice, and argument. The engagement we have received in the past few weeks has allowed us to understand that the voices we amplify directly impact campus dialogue. That is a level of influence that we take incredibly seriously. We know that while our platform allows us to provide space for voices that are often institutionally marginalized and silenced, it can also create an echo chamber or worse, highlight harmful ideas if our process is hasty or heedless. As editors, we aim to ensure that our journalism does not harm our readers, our community, or our writers. We draw strict lines between hate speech and free speech. Our pieces undergo three rounds of editorial edits, three rounds of copy edits, and two rounds of edits by our managing editor and editor in chief. We are always asking ourselves and our writers what our reasons for publishing a piece are.

There are two very important parts of this paragraph. First, the Columbia Daily Spectator has far, far more editorial reviews than we see in the credentialed media these days; broadcast media have to get the news on too quickly, while newspapers have been cutting reportorial and editorial staff to the bone. When the Daily Spectator staffers get out into the real world, looking for journalism jobs, not only will they find disappointing salaries at the entry level, and bemoaning the fact that their opportunities are only at the Allentown Morning Call or the Lexington Herald-Leader, rather than The New York Times or Washington Post, but they’ll quickly see that what few editors there are, are a harried bunch who provide little oversight and too-cursory glances at their work. You can see this in the poor editing, incomplete journalism, and lousy grammar in so many newspapers.

But the second part is that they “aim to ensure that our journalism does not harm our readers, our community, or our writers.” This is what has led so many newspapers to censor the truth, to not report the news, or not report it fully, if telling the whole truth might, in the words of the Sacramento Bee, “perpetuat(e) stereotypes about who commits crime in our community.” The McClatchy Mugshot Policy worries that publishing police mugshots “disproportionately harms people of color and those with mental illness,” so they have a policy against it, and the Herald-Leader seems to make its exceptions to the policy when the charged offenders are white, to actually skew the truth.

Miss Yurdakul continued to state that they would continue to provide a platform for the opinions of others, which seems to be more than the Herald-Leader or Inquirer do, but I have to wonder about what the limits of what she, and others, at the Columbia Daily Spectator would impose? Would the Daily Spectator accept an opposing OpEd piece on whether biological males should be allowed to compete in women’s sports as ‘transgender women’, or would that be regarding as “harm (their) readers, (their) community, or (their) writers”? Would it be considered “hate speech”, and be put beyond the pale?

The New York Times had had, for decades now, the masthead blurb, “All the News That’s Fit to Print”, but the Times, among other great, and not-so-great, newspapers across this country have taken editorial decisions that some things, some actual news, some news that’s just politically incorrect, simply isn’t fit to print these days.

We’re seeing it every day, when The Philadelphia Inquirer declares itself to be “anti-racist” and then just plain doesn’t give its readers the news.

Miss Yurdakul, and her compatriots at the Columbia Daily Spectator, and at journalism schools across the country, are going to be the next people hired into the nation’s newsrooms, and some of them will last and become editors. Will they maintain Miss Yurdakul’s commitment to publish opposing viewpoints, to actually inform the public of the debates that are going on out there, or will they follow today’s line, and censor news that doesn’t fit their political views, and their ‘social justice’ goals?

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 A site search for “Lia Thomas” turned up only one story about Mr Thomas’ participation in the Ivy League championships, and offered no opinions. The article did note the controversy over Mr Thomas, and that Columbia’s head coach Diana “Caskey said that Ivy League communications has asked her not to comment on Thomas’ performance and eligibility.”
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Bidenflation If inflation was 'only' 7.5%, what items went up less than that to counterbalance those which increased more?

We recently reported on the price of a gallon of milk in the Bluegrass State, and how it had increased 121.21% since President Trump left office. Grocery prices in general have risen. We also noted that January inflation, year-over-year, rose 7.5%, which was higher than the average hourly wage increase of 5.7%. Two days ago, I tweeted that regular gasoline had jumped 20¢ per gallon.

Now comes The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Utility bills are soaring in the Philly region and so is customer outrage

Peco gas bills are up 38% from last year. PGW’s are up 17%. “I have never paid this much for heat in the winter.”

by Andrew Maykuth | Sunday, February 27, 2022

Also see: Pa. electricity prices will be rising by as much as 50% this week. Here’s how you can save.

Byron Goldstein closely monitors the energy usage at his Glenside home. So when he got a $651 bill from Peco Energy for combined electric and gas usage in January, 37% more than the $477 he paid the previous January, he knew something was off.

Goldstein discovered that Peco’s gas supply charge skyrocketed since January 2021, accounting for most of the increase. Goldstein, 74, was unsatisfied by the company’s response to his phone calls, so he filed a formal complaint to the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission, urging the state regulator to roll back Peco’s “outrageous and irresponsible” price increase.

He was not alone. Across the Philadelphia area, thousands of utility customers opened their bills in recent weeks to learn that the cost of heating their homes had soared much more than the 7% inflation rate. Social media platforms lit up with posts from unhappy customers, directing their wrath at energy companies, regulators, and politicians.

“I have never paid this much for heat in the winter,” wrote a Philadelphia resident posting on Nextdoor.com, where several threads contained hundreds of comments venting about the price increase.

There’s more at the original, but it needs to be noted: these price increases came before the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

According to charts in the Inquirer original, natural; gas prices are actually significantly lower now than they were in 2008, but they’ve jumped significantly this winter:

The price has indeed gone up: A typical Peco customer who used 150 hundred cubic feet (ccf) of gas was billed $171.25 in January, up 38% or $46.90 from January 2021, according to PUC data. A Philadelphia Gas Works customer who used the same amount of gas was billed $261.71 in January, up 17% or $37.91 from a year ago.

Electricity bills also went up in Pennsylvania on Dec. 1, though not as much as gas bills.

With price increases like these, just how real does that reported 7.5% inflation rate feel?

The Inquirer reported, last December, that cable television and internet service rates from Comcast have increased, as have prices from AT&T and SlingTV.

The Wall Street Journal reported that NBC had a 42% drop in viewership for the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, compared to the 2018 games in Pyeongchang, South Korea, something I attribute to NBC’s ‘free’ coverage being dominated by curling and other lower-interest events, while the events people are most interested in, ice skating and Alpine skiing, were being shown more often on Peacock, an internet streaming service which, naturally, has a subscriber fee. That’s just more money out of people’s pockets, or they miss out, a form of inflation that goes unaccounted.

The obvious question, at least to me, is: if inflation was ‘only’ 7.5%, what items went up less than that to counterbalance those which increased more?

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NIMBY! Not in my back yard!

It seems that the left are much happier with liberal principles when they are applied to other people, on other neighborhoods!

Why does a wealthy California town say it opposes affordable housing? To save mountain lions

The town’s decision drew quick scorn as a brazen attempt to evade even minimally denser development in one of California’s most exclusive locales.

by Liam Dillon, Tribune News Service | Saturday, February 26, 2022 | 7:00 AM EST

The well-heeled Silicon Valley suburb of Woodside, Calif., has come up with a novel way to block plans that would potentially bring in more affordable housing: Declare itself Cougar Town.

Earlier this month, officials in the enclave of 5,500 people announced that all of Woodside was exempt from a new state housing law that allows for duplex development on single-family home lots.

The reason? The entire town is a habitat for potentially endangered mountain lions.

Really? As in cougars — and I mean cougars, the animal, not the Urban Dictionary cougars — roam the streets of Woodside?

Woodside’s decision drew quick scorn as a brazen attempt to evade even minimally denser development in one of California’s most exclusive locales. The bucolic, woodsy town near Stanford University and the heart of Silicon Valley has a median home value of $4.5 million. Among its residents have been the founders of technology giants Intuit, Intel and Symantec as well as Oracle founder Larry Ellison, who reportedly spent $200 million to build a Japanese-style 16th-century imperial palace across 23 acres.

San Mateo County, where Woodside is located, gave Joe Biden 291,496, or 77.89%, of its votes, while just 75,584, 20.20%, to President Trump. That’s much higher than the statewide advantage Mr Biden enjoyed, 63.48% to 34.32%. While I couldn’t find the breakdown for Woodside individually, it’s safe to say it’s a pretty liberal area.

The mountain-lion card is not playing well with advocates, who note the jarring irony of enormous mansions inhabited by few juxtaposed against the housing needs of many.

“Right now, you could have five people in a 5,000-square-foot mansion sharing one kitchen, and it’s OK,” said Sonja Trauss, executive director of YIMBY Law, a San Francisco group that advocates for local governments to approve more housing. “But once you have two kitchens, it’s suddenly a problem for the mountain lions?”

Why am I thinking of Comrade Kaprugina in Dr Zhivago, saying, “There was living space for thirteen families in this one house!”

Yuri Andreievich Zhivago replies, “Yes. Yes, this is a better arrangement; more just.” Of course, Yuri Andreievich understands what happens if he doesn’t toe the Bolshevik line. The left might think that zoning for cheaper houses, more “affordable” housing, is “more just,” but it’s obvious that the folks who’ve driven the median home value to an insane $4.5 million aren’t very interested in having neighboring homes, and neighboring people, who will bring down the values of their own housing, their own community.

We see it all over, in the tony areas of Philadelphia like Society Hill and Rittenhouse Square, where the well-to-do white liberals are quite happy to vote for Democratic politicians and liberal policies, as long as the poorer, black and Hispanic residents of the City of Brotherly Love are kept down in Kensington and Strawberry Mansion. Philadelphia is highly ‘diverse’ as far as overall population figures are concerned, but far more internally segregated on a by-neighborhood basis.

Business Insider noted:

California remains the state with the highest poverty level in the US, according to a September 2021 report from the US Census Bureau.

In the report, three-year poverty level averages were calculated for each state and the District of Columbia using the supplemental poverty measure, which found that 15.4% of California residents lived in poverty from 2018 to 2020. Only the District of Columbia had a higher rate of poverty — 16.5%.

The supplemental poverty measure expands on the official poverty measure, which was developed by Social Security economist Mollie Orshansky in the 1960s, by accounting for cost of living, work and medical expenses, tax credits, and government programs designed to assist low-income families and individuals.

If the Pyrite State has the nation’s highest percentage of poverty, it also has some of our wealthiest citizens, a lot of whom live in Hollywood, in Bel Air, and in Woodside. Seth Rogen is a Canadian comedian, actor, screenwriter, film producer, and voice actor who, according to the site Celebrity Net Worth, has a net worth of $80 million, and was excoriated for a mindless tweet in which he said that living in a big city, one has to simply accept that leaving valuables in your car means that people will break in and rob it. When you’re worth $80 million, you can afford to replace stuff. Mr Rogen isn’t homeless. He lives on a 10-acre estate in the West Hollywood Hills, having sold, for $2.16 million, another West Hollywood home behind high hedges and a tall, metal fence. ‘Twould seem that, despite his seemingly cavalier attitude toward petty robbery, Mr Rogan, a self-described left-winger, does care about security for his property and himself.

One wonders how many “affordable” duplexes Mr Rogan has had built on his 10-acre estate, to help the less fortunate in Los Angeles County.

As I have previously noted, the hypocrisy of the left is astounding! They are great at telling other people what they should do, but not so great at putting their money where their mouths — or keyboards — are.

 

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What have the #ClimateAction activists done to reduce their own carbon emissions?

“I’ll believe ‘carbon pollution’ is dangerous when people like Biden stop putting out so darned much themselves,” William Teach said. Why, I have to ask, don’t the people telling us we must reduce our CO2 output ever do anything to reduce their own? Why wouldn’t someone from the Show Me State, such as Mr Teach’s frequent commenter Elwood P Dowd, want to show us just what and how much he has done, personally, to reduce his own carbon footprint?

What I have done isn’t much: we replaced our light bulbs with LEDs, not to reduce our energy consumption, but because when we bought the place, it had incandescent bulbs that were burning out anyway. In addition, as we remodeled the kitchen, we installed canister lights, and the much lower temperature LEDs are far safer in canister lights.

I installed a clothesline outside, which means that, in decent weather, our bedding and my clothes gets dried using solar and wind power. Admittedly, I did this because my darling bride (of 42 years, 9 months, and 7 days) likes the way the bedding smells after line drying, rather than any concern over global warming climate change, but it still saves on over an hour in the 220-volt, 30-amp electric dryer.

Of course, many of the urbanites who like to lecture us on reducing our CO2 output don’t have yards in which they could install a clothesline, or, if they did, are stuck with homeowners’ associations which won’t permit it. But it is amusing to me that none of them ever seem to even think about it or mention it.

Our remodeled kitchen, including the propane range! All of the work except the red quartz countertops was done by my family and me. Click to enlarge.

When I added windows, I added double-paned insulated ones; you can see the large windows I installed in our kitchen remodel to the left.

It replaced one much narrower double hung window. I added another window in our living room, along a wall which had only one, and the room needed more light. As I had walls open, I added insulation to exterior walls. When we put in new kitchen appliances, we were buying energy efficient ones.

Perhaps my motives weren’t pure enough for the warmunists — Mr Teach calls them ‘warmists’ in his long-term, daily ‘If All You See‘ posts — but, in the end, my wife and I still did these things, and we’ve spent a considerable amount of money doing so; that kitchen window was over $700 just by itself.

Oil lamp and candles on the kitchen counter. Photo by Dana R Pico, on January 16, 2022, when power was lost due to a snowstorm.

Of course, we also added propane, to a house which was previously all-electric, because when the sparktricity goes out in our end-of-the-line farmhouse, it can be out for several days. I’m sure that has us near the gates of Hell as far as the global warming climate activists are concerned, but, then again, we didn’t freeze when we lost power for 46 hours in the middle of January.

So, what has the man from Missouri done, what has the Hirsute One done, to reduce their carbon footprints (feetprint?) that they tell the rest of us we must do? We already know that Mr Teach’s frequent commenter ‘Hairy’ is keeping his current, fossil-fueled automobile, and has no plans to trade it in for a plug-in electric, but, then again, he has told us he’s in his 70s and doesn’t ever plan on buying another vehicle. Being less than two months from my 69th birthday, I can understand that!

I don’t expect our high-flying government officials like the ‘Climate Tsar’ John F Kerry — a very wealthy man who made his money the old-fashioned way; he married it! — to stop flying around the world in his private jet, a Gulfstream IV, registration number N57HJ. But maybe, just maybe, some of the otherwise regular people advocating all sorts of restrictions on other people could spend a little time telling us what sacrifices they have made, what things they have done, to put their money where their mouths — or keyboards — are.

But at some point, those global warming climate change activists need to do more than just lecture others; they need to lead by example. That so few of them do says a lot about how seriously they take global warming climate.

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Philly continues the tyranny

The heavily politicized Center for Disease Control have finally eased some of their masking guidelines, but, of course, the petty little dictators in the City of Brotherly Love want to keep Philadelphians wearing the symbols of authoritarian control.

CDC loosens COVID-19 masking guidance, but Philly is keeping its mask mandate for now

The city’s health department said it would review the CDC’s new guidance, but the safety restrictions in place in the city are based on local conditions and “months of data specific to Philadelphia.”

by Jason Laughlin and Kasturi Pananjady | Friday, February 25, 2033

A change in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance for mask-wearing Friday means federal authorities no longer recommend indoor masking as a COVID-19 precaution for much of Southeastern Pennsylvania, including Philadelphia.

Whether that will change masking policy set by the health department in Philadelphia, the only place in the region with an indoor mask mandate, is uncertain.

The Philadelphia Inquirer, which loves mandates and dictatorial control of the plebeians, illustrated their article with a photo of sheep “guests at the Kimmel Center’s Verizon Hall last December,” all dutifully masked up.

We have previously reported on the city’s Health Commissioner, Dr Cheryl Bettigole, saying, on Groundhog Day, that Philadelphia lifting COVID-19 restrictions was “probably several months away.”

“Our team is actively discussing what an off-ramp looks like,” Bettigole said when asked about easing restrictions. “If you think about where we are with this particular wave and case rates right now, we’re probably several months away from a place where we will have the kind of safety to drop all the current restrictions.”

The city did end its vaccine mandate for indoor dining on the 14th, but retained the mask mandate. To me, it’s obvious: the city was depending upon cute college coeds working as hostesses to enforce the vaccine mandate, and who can know how reliable that was, especially if confronted by a large, scary man. But masks? It’s obvious to anyone who can see whether someone is wearing one; they are the very visible symbols of submission.

The Philadelphia Department of Public Health said it would review the CDC’s new guidance, but the safety restrictions in place in the city are based on local conditions and “months of data specific to Philadelphia,” said Matt Rankin, a spokesperson for the department.

“At this time we plan to continue the implementation of these current response levels as the pandemic unfolds,” he said. . . . .

The CDC changed its guidelines for masking Friday because easy access to vaccines and testing, better treatments for COVID-19, and widespread immunity have “moved the pandemic to a new phase,” the agency said in a news release. The agency’s recommendations were also being widely disregarded, with states increasingly ending COVID precautions despite 95% of U.S. counties falling into the CDC’s old definition of substantial or high transmission. The new guidelines break COVID-19 risk levels into categories of high, medium, and low by county. Indoor masking is recommended only at the high risk level.

Very widely disregarded. I have previously noted the masks required sign at the entrance to the Kroger grocery store on Bypass Road in Richmond, Kentucky, and, shopping there just Friday morning, I saw what has been the case all along: significant disobedience to the sign. I certainly wasn’t wearing a mask, and neither were at least three-quarters of the other shoppers. Why should they? We already know that the face masks most people use just don’t stop Omicron, and the so-called experts recommend a N-95 mask. That recommendation was on January 10th, and now, just 46 days later, the CDC are relaxing their masking guidance? One wonders if they listen to each other?

Of course, elected politicians do listen to their constituents, and they know that the public are just plain tired of all of the authoritarian decrees, and those decrees were subject to widespread disobedience; that’s why so many places had weakened or dropped their mandates well before the CDC decided that they must find their people, so they could lead them.

Philadelphia? Completely controlled by the Democrats, to the point where the last Republican mayor left office while George VI was still King of England, so the Democrats running the city aren’t in the least bit worried about losing in the general elections; any real action comes in the Democratic primaries. In 2008, there were 57 entire precincts in which Republican presidential nominee John McCain didn’t get a single vote; in 2012, there were 59 entire precincts in which Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney didn’t get a single vote. In 2020, Joe Biden carried Philadelphia with 81.44% of the vote. You can see why Democrats in Philly aren’t concerned.

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Three more dead in Philly, and the Inquirer doesn’t care But Larry Krasner and the Inquirer sure do care about cops who are exonerated!

As both of our regular readers know, I check the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page on weekday mornings, and the news was pretty depressing. As we noted on Wednesday, the city had crept to one above the same-day homicide total for 2021. But as of 11:59 PM EST on Wednesday, February 23rd, the total had jumped by three to 79 homicides, vis a vis ‘just’ 75 on the same date last year, and 53 in 2020.

Make no mistake here: 2020 was a bloody year, finishing with 499 murders, just one short of the then-record of 500, set during the crack cocaine wars of 1990. But 2021 didn’t just surpass the old record; 562 homicides blew it out of the water.

Wednesday’s killings? There wasn’t a single story on any of them either on the main page or the crime page of The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website, something which was no surprise at all. There were, however, a couple of related stories which caught my attention. In one, “The Inquirer’s look at itself ignores the paper’s history of exposing racial injustice: The sweeping claims in ‘Black City, White Paper’ are overly broad and shamelessly short-sighted, writes Huntly Collins, a reporter who spent 18 years at the newspaper,” a LaSalle University journalism professor and former Inquirer reported responded to the newspaper’s crying 21st century judgement about its 19th and 20th century history. Though he avoided the use of the term #woke[1]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading, he was clearly referring to them as he made it clear that the paper’s history needed to be viewed through the lens of the circumstances of the times. He noted that perhaps the paper could have hired more minority staff, but also noted that newspapers in general had been shedding journalists’ positions for a couple of decades now, and union contracts specified that, in layoffs, the last hired were the first fired.

The Inquirer’s look at itself also glossed over the economic crisis facing local newspapers as they strive to hire more minority journalists at a time when newspaper jobs are in steep decline. Since 2004, some 1,800 newspapers have folded, including 60 dailies. Nationwide, newspaper employment of editorial staff has plummeted to just 30,000, down a whopping 57 percent from 2008. The Inquirer once employed some 680 reporters, editors and other editorial staff. Today, that number is down to about 200. Even the best laid plans to diversify the staff falter when confronted with economic forces that shrink the size of the pie rather than enlarging it.

Publisher Elizabeth “Lisa” Hughes has basically told readers that the newspaper she runs will not report on things which could lead to a negative image of minority populations, that the newspaper she runs will self-censor the truth in favor of “anti-racism” and social justice.[2]Commenter Lavern Merriweather stated that I must be racist for noting that the Inquirer hides the racial aspect of the news even in the stories that it covers, and that, not being black myself, I … Continue reading The plain truth, the unvarnished truth, is apparently a bad thing.

Then there was this gem:

DA Krasner denounces dismissal of charges against two officers charged with beating man with special needs

Krasner said he sees “a disturbing pattern” of judges dismissing charges against police officers.

by Mensah M Dean | Tuesday, February 22, 2022

Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner on Tuesday criticized the decision by a judge to dismiss charges against two police officer brothers whom he charged in April with chasing and beating a man with special needs after falsely accusing the man of tampering with cars in their far Northeast neighborhood.

Krasner, who pledged after taking office in 2018 to hold accountable officers who break the law, suggested that the decision by Municipal Court Judge William Austin Meehan Jr. during a preliminary hearing to clear the two brothers — former Police Inspector James Smith and former detective Patrick Smith — was part of a larger pattern of judges going easy on accused police.

“We are seeing a disturbing pattern of criminal cases against police officers getting charges against them thrown out by judges during the preliminary hearing phase, only to be reinstated on appeal. The law applies equally to everyone,” Krasner said. “Philadelphians should ask why some judges are finding no accountability at a preliminary hearing for police when they commit the same crimes that get everyone else held over for trial.”

Krasner, who has frequently clashed with the officers’ labor union, added: “My office will consider all possible avenues for seeking justice in this matter, and to hold accountable the individuals who chased, terrorized, and assaulted a young and innocent man with Asperger syndrome.”

There’s more at the original, but Judge Meehan heard the testimony of the alleged victim, and then dismissed the charges against the tweo former police officers.

“The court dismissed all charges…because the evidence presented by the prosecutor failed to prove that a crime was committed,” said defense attorney Fortunato Perri, who represented James Smith. “Inspector Smith and Detective Smith have dedicated decades of their lives proudly protecting and serving the citizens of Philadelphia. They look forward to continuing those efforts in the future.”

Of course, the District Attorney ought to be familiar with dismissed charges, because that’s what he does very frequently: since District Attorney Krasner took office, the percentage of firearms charges resulting in convictions has dramatically decreased. In Mr Krasner’s first year in office, 2018, 57% of Violations of Uniform Firearm Act only arrests resulted in convictions, with 35% having the charges dismissed. Those trend lines crossed the following year, with a larger percentage of charges dismissed, 47%, than resulting in convictions, 43%, and only got worse in 2020 and 2021, 49%/42%, and 62%/36% respectively. In their attempts to get illegal firearm possessions off the streets, the Philadelphia Police Department increased the number of VUFA arrests each year, and each year Mr Krasner’s office let the (alleged) malefactors off the hook in increasing numbers. Mr Krasner said:

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

The alleged injuries that the officers’ alleged victim suffered included “a black eye and abrasions on the back of his head, elbows, and knees,” pretty much the type of crimes the District Attorney doesn’t care about prosecuting anyway . . . unless they are committed by a police officer.

So, we have seen 79 homicides in 54 days, 1.4630 per day, ahead of the pace set last year, and at least at the time of writing this article, 10:38 AM EST on Thursday, February 24th, the Inquirer hadn’t even noticed, but was still promoting the softer-than-soft on crime, George Soros-sponsored District Attorney’s story from two days earlier. I have said it before: to the “anti-racist” Philadelphia Inquirer, black lives — and if any of the victims had been white, the paper would have been all over the case — really don’t matter.

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 Commenter Lavern Merriweather stated that I must be racist for noting that the Inquirer hides the racial aspect of the news even in the stories that it covers, and that, not being black myself, I have no right to comment on the black community in the City of Brotherly Love.
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Los gringos estan locos!

I had to take a screenshot of this tweet, in case Dana Houle deletes it, and I can only say that I am highly disappointed that someone named Dana could be so boneheadedly stupid. You can click on the image to get to the original tweet . . . if it still exists.

Markos Moulitsas, the founder of the Lost Kos, tweeted something similarly stupid.

The bombs are falling, people are trying to flee — at least as of this writing, the roads out of Kyiv are jammed — and the American snowflakes are worried about whether the Ukrainians are wearing masks. https://www.thepiratescove.us/wp-content/plugins/wp-monalisa/icons/wpml_wacko.gif Los gringos estan locos!

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Bidenflation! The price of a gallon of milk has increased 121.21% since Joe Biden became President

Photo by Dana R. Pico, © January 4, 2022. Free use is granted, with appropriate credit. Click to enlarge.

In 2020, back when Donald Trump was President of the United States, a gallon of milk at the Kroger on Bypass Road in Richmond, Kentucky, was 99¢ per gallon. In 2021, the price had increased to $1.29 per gallon, in the same store.

Then, on January 4, 2022, I took a photo of the increased price, to $1.79 per gallon, and posted it on Twitter. That was a pretty big jump, 38.76%, but I at least hoped that the price would remain stable.

Photo by Dana R. Pico, © February 23, 2022. Free use is granted, with appropriate credit. Click to enlarge.

Well, I might have hoped that, but my hopes have been quickly dashed; a gallon of 1% milk, at the same store, even in the same dairy case, is now $2.19 per gallon, a 22.35% increase in 50 days! Milk has risen, in the same store, 121.21% since the end of 2020, since the end of President Trump’s term, since Joe Biden has moved into the White House.

121.21%!

We had previously noted that the January year-over-year inflation rate was 7.5%, higher than economists’ guesstimates, the highest in 40 years, and higher than the average hourly wage increase of 5.7%.

It’s one thing to see that statistics printed in The Wall Street Journal, and something entirely different to see them, in yellow and red cardboard signs, as you are reaching in to buy a gallon of milk.

The average working stiff might not read The Washington Post, might not pay attention to the statistics as given on finger-blackening newsprint or a flickering monitor screen, but he’s likely to have noticed how everything has gotten more expensive.

On September 16, 2016, Heather Long, then with CNN, published “Problem: Most Americans don’t believe the unemployment rate is 5%,” noting that, despite the ‘official’ U-3 unemployment rate, people believed that unemployment was much higher, around 9% or more, which I pointed out was close to the U-6 unemployment rate at the time. And no matter what the official ‘numbers’ are, when a gallon of milk has gone up 121.21% in just over a year, inflation certainly feels higher than 5.7%