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Fear-mongering from The Nation, as they fear that The South Shall Rise Again!

The Nation is a biweekly ‘progressive’ political journal, whose positions have usually been on the far left end of the American political spectrum. The magazine used a fairly simple drawing to illustrate an article this morning, but I thought a drawing of Pickett’s Charge, from the Battle of Gettyburg, would be more appropriate, because they’re worrying that The South Shall Rise Again!

In the Attacks on Trans Rights, We’re Seeing the Rise of a New Confederacy

These legislative assaults constitute the spear tip of a nation within a nation, threatening the foundations of democracy.

by Nan D Hunter | Monday, June 26, 2023 | 5:00 AM EDT

A right-wing inquisition is singling out young transgender Americans, their parents, their teachers, and their doctors as targets in the battle over what kind of nation we are and want to be. Since 2021, roughly half the states have passed at least one law designed to eliminate medical or educational policies that recognize trans youth and protect them from abuse. According to the ACLU, 20 states enacted 72 new anti-trans laws in the first six months of 2023; more than 200 are in the pipeline.

Anti-trans campaigners seek to create a blanket of repression. Because the recent wave of anti-trans laws was not triggered by a landmark event like the rush of anti-abortion laws enacted in the wake of the Dobbs decision, this new reality has crept up on the country. Major media outlets have struggled to keep up with which laws have been passed in which states. With the exception, perhaps, of the trans people who find themselves in the cross hairs of these new laws, almost no one saw it coming.

The Nation allows non-subscribers three free articles, but you can read it here without going to the magazine’s website. As this article is approaching 2,900 words, you can read the rest below the fold. Continue reading →

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If it’s a gang, say it’s a gang! The professional media don't usually tell us outright lies, but their editorial and stylistic decisions sure do shade the truth!

The main page of The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website had, at 7:07 PM EDT on Sunday, June 25th, an interesting juxtaposition. The site seems to automatically search for and note related stories, and had two listed below the main story headline.

A South Philly neighborhood was awash in retaliatory gunfire. A recent trial showed the human cost.

“We don’t like each other,” Nyseem Smith said while telling police about shootings he and his friends committed against rival groups.

by Chris Palmer | Sunday, June 25, 2023 | 5:00 AM EDT

To hear Nyseem Smith tell it, shooting people was something of a pastime for him and his friends in South Philadelphia.

Week after week, sometimes day after day, Smith said, he and his crew from 31st Street would fall into a familiar routine: They’d steal a car, hop in with guns they all shared, then go looking for rivals to shoot.

Sometimes, he said, they’d seek out young men associated with 27th Street, another neighborhood group. Other times, they’d look for people who lived around the nearby Wilson Park apartments.

The cycle of violence — sometimes chronicled on Instagram — became virtually impossible to extinguish. And by the time investigators caught up with Smith in 2019, he confessed to a staggering array of crimes.

I guess that Mr Smith knew they had him! But, as you’d probably have guessed, he was singing because the prosecutors had cut him a deal.

Regular readers of The First Street Journal — both of them! — have probably realized by now that I read with a careful eye, and notice things that some might miss. In the first four paragraphs of reporter Chris Palmer’s story, we see Mr Smith’s, and other people’s, gangs referred to as “his friends,” “neighborhood group,” “crew”, and “people”. We have previously noted that the newspaper really, really, really doesn’t like to refer to gangs as gangs, and in the 42 paragraphs beyond the four that I quoted, unless I just plain missed it — and unless you’re an Inquirer subscriber, you can’t check my work on this! 🙂 — the words “gang” or “gangs” appear exactly zero times.

Mr Palmer is one of the four Inquirer reporters credited with the article in which the newspaper told us that there were no real gangs in the city!

In Philadelphia, there are no gangs in the traditional, nationally known sense. Instead, they are cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families. The groups have names — Young Bag Chasers, Penntown, Northside — and members carry an allegiance to each other, but they aren’t committing traditional organized crimes, like moving drugs, the way gangs did in the past.

Ahhh, but that search function led the Inky to post a link to this story:

Krasner, state officials announce nine arrests in long-running South Philly gang feud

District Attorney Larry Krasner said Thursday that an additional six suspects are being sought.

by Vinny Vella and Mike Newall | Thursday, April 15, 2021

Jackee Nichols had come to believe the city had forgotten about her 15-year-old grandson, Rasul Benson. In October 2018, Rasul was gunned down at a South Philadelphia Gulf station while pumping gas with his friends for tip money to buy a cheesesteak.

On Thursday morning, Nichols finally received the answer she had been waiting for when an investigator working with the Philadelphia Gun Violence Task Force called to tell her a man had been arrested and another was being sought for Benson’s slaying as part of a sweep of nine suspects involved in a gang-fueled turf war between 2016 and 2020.

There’s more at the original, but it seems that the Inky wasn’t shying away from the truth on income tax day two years ago. I assume that this somehow all stems from publisher Elizabeth Hughes’ edict that the newspaper would be an “anti-racist news organization.”

We are, we have been told, supposed to respect journalists. Columnist Jenice Armstrong recently told us that “the press is the only profession mentioned in the U.S. Constitution,” though it actually refers to the right ot people to publish, not the journalists’ profession. The newspaper’s Senior Vice President and Executive Editor, Gabriel Escobar, said, “When people say ‘fake news’ and it is aimed at staining the work that journalists do, there’s great danger in that.”

Yet here is The Philadelphia Inquirer, our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, older than The New York Times and The Washington Post, winner of twenty Pulitzer Prizes, mealy-mouthing their words, seemingly having amended their stylebook to soften the truth rather than simply printing it.

Our professional media don’t normally lie outright, though, like any other human beings, reporters and editors can occasionally make mistakes. But the bias in the media comes through, if you take care to notice, by what they choose to print, and not to print, by the words that they choose, normally regulated by a stylebook, to use in their stories.

If it’s a gang, say it’s a gang!

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Today’s left see landlords as Snidely Whiplash, tying Sweet Nell to the railroad tracks

In November on 2017, the voters of the City of Brotherly Love voted in a self-proclaimed “progressive prosecutor,” a criminal defense attorney, Larry Krasner, whose campaign website proudly proclaims that:

During his first term, he has supported victims, he has exonerated the innocent, and he has held police accountable. He has reduced future years of incarceration and supervision while helping to drop the jail population. He has focused on the most serious crimes in Philadelphia while working with leaders to address the root causes of violence.

Translation: Mr Krasner hates the police and loves the criminal class. He wants to keep criminals out of jail, and reduce probation times.

His policies include ending criminal charges against those caught with marijuana possession, ending cash bail for those accused of some misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies, reducing supervision for parolees, and seeking more lenient sentences for certain crimes. During his time in office, he has advocated for greater police accountability and pursued police misconduct.

Mr Krasner made no secret of his plans when he first ran for office, and the good citizens of Philadelphia elected him to become District Attorney. Clearly, the majority of Philadelphians are perfectly comfortable with hating the police and coddling criminals.

The draconian, economy-destroying reaction to the COVID-19 panicdemic — and no, that’s not a misspelling; panic is exactly how the response should be characterized — included mass job losses, and many communities put eviction moratoria in place, so those who could not — or would not — pay their rent wouldn’t be thrown out of the apartments in which they lived.

Well, evictions have resumed, and the left are unhappy. It’s very difficult to proclaim that people should be able to simply live without paying rent to property owners, so now the left are using the tactic of complaining about how evictions are handled.

‘I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy’: Housing advocates say eviction process in Philly must change

During a two-hour hearing, tenants and attorneys described a system that’s violent and traumatic.

By Aaron Moselle | Wednesday, June 21, 2023 | 5:19 PM EDT

The knock on the door startled Mark Person.

The person waiting outside shocked him.

It was a deputy landlord-tenant officer. And he was there to evict Person from his Roxborough apartment.

“He looked at his watch and said I had 10 minutes, and that he had others to serve and that I had to hurry up and be out. There was no notice of courtesy — just him standing with his hand atop his pistol like a cowboy Western,” said Person.

As has been journalistic practice in recent times, the article begins with a sort of human-interest hook. The original from WHYY, Philadelphia’s National Public Radio station is not behind a paywall.

As we have previously noted, a deputy landlord-tenant officer had an eviction go bad, and a woman, over $8,000 behind in her rent, being kicked out was shot in the head.

Naturally, it didn’t take long before the Usual Suspects were up in arms, as the furthest left Democratic mayoral candidate, Helen Gym Flaherty — who, thank the Lord, lost in the primary — to politicize it. She tweeted:

While details are still coming to light, I’m appalled by today’s shooting at Girard Court Apartments and my heart is with the impacted families.

I’ve raised alarm bells for years about our city’s terrible eviction practices and worked to reform them.

So, what did we have? The family were more than $8,000 in arrears on their rent, which was apparently forgiven by the owner, in lieu of an agreement that they’d move out by the end of 2022. But the family wanted to stay, and petitioned the court to extend, for an unspecified period of time, a petition which was denied. If the eviction was being carried out on March 29th, the tenants had stayed three months beyond their agreed evacuation date.

In a subscribers-only article, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that City Councilcritters:

Jamie Gauthier and Kendra Brooks called for hearings in April after a deputy landlord-tenant officer shot a woman in the head during an attempted eviction lockout in North Philadelphia. Police said a struggle ensued between 35-year-old tenant Angel Davis and the privately contracted officer, who has still not been identified. The deputy discharged a weapon and struck Davis, who was hospitalized in critical condition.

The shooting sparked a protest and shined a light on a shadowy corner of the city’s legal system — one that housing advocates said is long overdue for sweeping reforms. Calls ranged from increased notice before lockouts occur to ramping up social service outreach to higher training standards and transparency.

The liberal councilcritters don’t like the system, don’t like it at all!

Instead of relying on sworn law enforcement personnel, Philadelphia’s courts allow a private for-profit attorney known as the landlord-tenant officer to carry out eviction orders in exchange for the right to collect millions in fees from landlords. The landlord-tenant officer in turn deputizes independent contractors hired to serve final notices and enforce lockouts.

Gauthier, a Democrat who represents West Philadelphia, described it as a profit-driven arrangement that lacked the oversight standards of other government agencies.

“There is no public bidding process, no standard for how to execute evictions, no mandatory training or law enforcement certification for deputies, and no accountability and oversight,” Gauthier said.

There is an unspoken undercurrent in all of this, that the left would like for all evictions to be handled by the sheriff. Some evictions in Philly still are, but the private system is less expensive for property owners, and thus more frequently used. If the City Council can increase the costs for the landlord-tenant officers, the higher costs could bring the landlord-tenant office to become just as expensive as having the sheriff handle things.

Lawmakers gathered reform ideas from housing attorneys and people who have been evicted. Brooks’ office said the Landlord-Tenant Office was created under state law but the city is exploring whether it has power to enact certain reforms — like requiring a detailed contract between the court system and the office. There currently isn’t one in place.

“(H)ousing attorneys and people who have been evicted,” huh? “(H)ousing advocates,” as quoted above, huh? In other words, people on one side of the issue.

And thus we come back to Larry Krasner, the prosecutor elected on a promise not to prosecute so much. Philadelphia Sheriff Rochelle Bilal is pretty lousy in her job, but at least she hasn’t promised to refuse to do evictions. The obvious question becomes: if the City Council can eliminate the Landlord-Tenant Office, and push all evictions onto the Sheriff’s Department, would the city not see a Democratic candidate for sheriff make a campaign promise not to enforce any eviction orders? That, after all, would make “housing advocates” and their fellow travelers very, very happy, as it would for the people who see landlords as being Snidely Whiplash, tying Sweet Nell to the railroad tracks.

The left have been slowly — and some would argue not-so-slowly — turning the City of Brotherly Love into a crime-and-drug-addiction filled [insert vulgar term for feces here] hole, and if the left can somehow deprive honest people of their property by refusing to enforce evictions, that would be the final straw.
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Also posted on American Free News Network. Check out American Free News Network for more well written and well reasoned conservative commentary.

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Killadelphia: 12-year-old killed on his birthday

I have said it numerous times before: The Philadelphia Inquirer only cares about individual homicides when the victim is an innocent, someone already of note, or a cute little white girl.

Well, another innocent kid got killed:

Laron Williams Jr. was killed on his 12th birthday, struck by stray bullets in what may be a drug-related shooting

The Williams family, overwhelmed with grief, on Friday asked for the city’s prayers.

by Ellie Rushing | Friday, June 23, 2023

Laron Williams Jr. was killed on his 12th birthday, struck by stray bullets while crossing the street.

It was 2 p.m., and the child — just a year away from becoming a teenager — walked 50 feet from his East Germantown house to pick up lunch from the sweet woman on Crowson Street who cooks for the neighborhood children. He said goodbye to her, then walked back across the 700 block of East Locust Avenue, headed for home.

But as he did, a man armed with a rifle jumped out of a car up the block and started shooting down the street. At least 11 shots were fired. Two men, ages 47 and 30, were struck multiple times, and fell on top of one another, police said.

And Laron — known to friends and family as “L.J.” — was caught in the line of fire. He was shot in the back multiple times, police said, and collapsed at the base of the stairs of the home he’d lived in all his life. His parents held him until police arrived, and officers rushed him to Einstein Medical Center.

There’s more at the original, but young Mr Williams did not survive. Khalif Chambers, 30, of Germantown, and Riley Darden, 47, of Norristown, the two adults, also perished.

A source with knowledge of the investigation, who was not permitted to speak publicly, said the shooting was tied to an ongoing drug feud.

Well, of course it was!

At least as of the time Inquirer reporter Ellie Rushing published her article, the Philadelphia Police had not made any arrests in the case. Deputy Police Commissioner Frank Vanore stated that at least one of the adult victims may have been deliberately targeted, but declined to address what the motive for the shooting had been.

Miss Rushing then gave readers four paragraphs about young Mr Williams life, before relating the statistics: 205 official homicides as of 11:59 PM EDT on Thursday, June 22nd:

  • Over 100 persons under 18 shot, including 14 aged 12 or younger
  • 18 minors killed
  • 14 children aged 12 or younger shot, at least seven of whom were struck by stray bullets
  • Roughly 12% of city’s shooting victims were under 18, a slightly higher percentage than during 2021 and 2022

Of course, Philly’s worn-out Mayor, Jim Kenney, had something to say on Twitter, something Miss Rushing noted, and something which was widely mocked. Mr Kenney has had 7½ years in office, and while he is combitching about the state legislature, under Mayor Michael Nutter, his immediate predecessor, the homicide numbers got lower during his term, and his last three years in office, they were under 300 for the year, under 250 in two of them, and the state’s firearms laws were no different then.

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The pot calling the kettle black: Jenice Armstrong tells us that cable news networks are biased The Philadelphia Inquirer laughably tells us that they "delineate between opinion and straight news."

I have said it many times before: I prefer to read the news rather than listen to it on radio or watch it on television. Part of that is because I have very degraded hearing, and part of it is because newspapers have the capability, especially now that digital newspapers have taken some advantage of being able to ignore the printed space limitations of the dead trees editions. Reading the news enables me to go back and reread a section if I found it confusing or contradictory. There’s also the personal point that I delivered newspapers from the sixth through eleventh grades.

But I had to laugh, and I mean a loud, trying-not-to-spill-my-Rice-Chex guffaw, at Jenice Armstrong’s OpEd column in this morning’s Philadelphia Inquirer:

I don’t watch cable news much anymore. Here’s why.

Recently, I hosted a screening of “Trustworthy,” a new documentary that asked Americans what they think about the state of media in the U.S. No surprise: It isn’t good.

by Jenice Armstrong | Thursday, June 22, 2023 | 7:00 AM EDT

When I decided to pursue a career in journalism, it wasn’t that long after the glory days of the uncovering of the Watergate scandal that took down Richard Nixon. Back then, Americans viewed us as heroes, champions of the people.

I worked at newspapers all over because I admired reporters such as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. I sacrificed time I could have spent with my family — or even starting one of my own — because I wanted to do this work. I’ve watched my colleagues do the same, only to end up working for a shrinking industry that Americans rank not far above used car salespeople.

Today, Americans trust journalism less than ever. A recent poll by the Knight Foundation and Gallup discovered that only 34% of Americans trust the news media to be accurate and fair; more — 38% — said they have “no trust at all” in the media.

Recently, I hosted a screening of Trustworthy, a new documentary on the subject of media distrust, at the Fitler Club, which was followed by a panel discussion. Executive producer Stephany Zamora, a Silicon Valley tech executive, created it after watching Trump supporters storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. She woke up the following morning determined to explore the media and democracy and whether it’s possible to find common ground.

Despite having zero filmmaking experience, Zamora set off on a 5,300-mile bus journey across the country interviewing academics, journalism experts (including Inquirer editor and senior vice president Gabriel Escobar), and ordinary Americans about what they think about the state of media in the U.S.

The blurb to the right is a screen capture from Miss Armstrong’s column, and it’s certainly true. But the columnist is about to miss the entire point.

All it takes to discredit news media are two words, Escobar notes in the documentary: “Fake news. When people say ‘fake news’ and it is aimed at staining the work that journalists do, there’s great danger in that.”

Mr Escobar said that as though the “work that journalists do” is somehow beyond criticism, beyond question. But I am old enough to remember ‘Rathergate‘, in which CBS News used forged documents to try to sabotage the younger President George Bush’s re-election bid. More, I watched CBS News coverage on election night that year, as Dan Rather kept asking reported Ed Bradley, who was doing the numbers that night, for another scenario in which Senator John F Kerry (D-MA) could somehow pull out a win, despite the numbers going against him as the returns rolled in, and the hang-dog expressions on all of their faces as they realized that President Bush was going to be re-elected.

Miss Armstrong wrote that she blamed the problems that journalism is facing on “cable news,” at which point she commented on the failures of CNN to revitalize itself after the firing of Jeff Zucker and hiring of Chris Licht, an effort which failed, and Mr Licht was let go himself earlier this month, after barely a year on the job. Amusingly, the Associated Press reported:

A lengthy profile of Licht in Atlantic magazine that came out on Friday, (June 2, 2023), titled “Inside the Meltdown at CNN,”[1]Internal link added by me; not in cited article. proved embarrassing and likely sealed his fate. Author Tim Alberta discussed how Licht’s effort to reach viewers turned off by CNN’s hostility to Trump had failed and damaged his standing with CNN journalists.

Another belly laugh here. According to the report, CNN’s journalists were complaining that, in effect, Mr Licht was trying to go for less strident anti-Trump stuff and trying to engage in less unfair more unbiased reporting.

Naturally, there was the Inquirer’s standard denigration of Fox News as slanted — which it is — but I was amused when Miss Armstrong told us that she used to keep cable news on as a “backdrop,” and “fall asleep listening to MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show.” If you listen to Miss Maddow’s show, you’ll never run out of biased news, as she is as hard left, on an admittedly leftist network, as you can find.

Miss Armstrong concluded:

In the meantime, I have another solution: Stick to newspapers, which delineate between opinion and straight news. Also, turn off 24-hour cable news, which too often blurs the line between fact and opinion and hypes events to boost ratings.

That’s what I do. I’m way less triggered that way. I sleep better, too.

“Stick to newspapers, which delineate between opinion and straight news”? How many times have I noted the journolism — the spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity — of the Inquirer? There are 68 stories on this website alone in which a site search for Inquirer journalism returned. We have noted how the Inky deliberately censors the police reports they use, refused to publish a story on a pro-life clinic, in Philadelphia, being vandalized, and we have previously noted the killing of 12-year-old Thomas J Siderio, Jr, after he took a shot at the police, and The Philadelphia Inquirer’s attempts to drum up sympathy for a wannabe gang-banger with parents who are criminals. We have pointed out that while the Philadelphia Police Department wanted to keep the name of the officer who shot young Mr Siderio confidential, for the officer’s safety, the Inquirer dug in, found out the officer’s name, and published it, in what I can only believe is an attempt to get the officer killed. The Inquirer’s Editorial Board had already opined that the killing of a young, gun-toting punk who opened fire on police young Mr Siderio should “should make every Philadelphian outraged.” I guess that outrage means that the Inquirer ought to put a target on the officer, to try to get him killed, because that’s exactly what they have done. What apparently didn’t outrage the Editorial Board was the fact that a wannabe gang banger was carrying a weapon and took a shot at the police.

Many of those stories were supposedly straight news stories, not specified opinion pieces.

But it’s hardly unexpected, because the Inquirer itself told us that, to meet publisher Elizabeth ‘Lisa’ Hughes’ requirement that it become an “anti-racist news organization,” the newspaper would censor the news, saying that the newspaper would be:

  • Establishing a Community News Desk to address long-standing shortcomings in how our journalism portrays Philadelphia communities, which have often been stigmatized by coverage that over-emphasizes crime.

In a city which has averaged over 500 murders a year for the past three years, and could be headed that way again in 2023, I’m not sure how the newspaper could possibly ‘overemphasize crime.’

  • Creating an internal forum for journalists to seek guidance on potentially sensitive content and to ensure that antiracism is central to the journalism.

So, the newspaper has publicly committed to an “antiracism” mission, and that, rather than simply presenting the facts, will guide how it publishes the news.

  • Commissioning an independent audit of our journalism that resulted in a critical assessment. Many of the recommendations are being addressed, and a process for tracking progress is being developed.
  • Training our staff and managers on how to recognize and avoid cultural bias.
  • Examining our crime and criminal justice coverage with Free Press, a nonprofit focused on racial justice in media.

Put plainly, Miss Hughes told us that the Inky would bend its coverage on “crime and criminal justice” with an organization which specifically labels itself activist, which wants reparations from media organizations, and which, despite Miss Hughes’ efforts, wants the newspaper to go even further to the left. The newspaper’s publisher wasn’t telling us about the Inky’s editorial and OpEd pages, she wasn’t “delineat(ing) between opinion and straight news,” but about everything that they publish!

Yes, Miss Armstrong is right: the cable news networks have biases, biases strong and obvious enough that News Nation has seen an opening for straight news programming, though I cannot comment on how successful they’ve been in avoiding bias.

But The Philadelphia Inquirer has a bias, too, and not just on the editorial and OpEd pages; they have already admitted it. It’s understandable that, as a newspaper employee and writer, she’d want people to get their news from newspapers, but to claim that newspapers, especially her own, “delineate between opinion and straight news,” is just laughably false.

References

References
↑1 Internal link added by me; not in cited article.
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The Dummkopf from Delaware strikes again! Nothing quite like insulting a leader when you are trying to negotiate with him

We have previously noted how Joe Biden has managed to insult Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, and how that hasn’t produced the foreign policy results the President wanted.

So now, with the United States military weakened by having send war materiel to Ukraine, and abandoned more in Afghanistan, Mr Biden has sent Secretary of State Antony Blinken to China for negotiations with Xi Jinping, and one would think that it might not be a great time to insult the Chinese President, right? Well, if one did think that, one would be wrong!

China says Biden comments likening leader Xi to a dictator ‘extremely absurd and irresponsible’

Associated Press | Wednesday, June 21, 2023

China on Wednesday called comments by President Joe Biden referring to Chinese leader Xi Jinping as a dictator “extremely absurd and irresponsible.”

The new clash of words comes just over a day after Secretary of State Antony Blinken concluded a visit to Beijing that sought to break the ice in a relationship that has hit a historical low.

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said Biden’s comments at a fundraiser in California “go totally against facts and seriously violate diplomatic protocol, and severely infringe on China’s political dignity.”

“It is a blatant political provocation. China expresses strong dissatisfaction and opposition,” Mao said at a daily briefing.

“The U.S. remarks are extremely absurd and irresponsible,” Mao said.

Blinken’s visit, during which he met with Xi, was aimed at easing tensions between the two superpowers but appeared not to have achieved any solid results.

The policy of the United States has long been that Taiwan is a part of China, but supports the separate government. However, Xi Jinping has long been annoyed at Taiwan’s separate government, and now that he has secured his position at home as President for life, and pretty much rooted out any real opponents, he has the opportunity to invade and conquer Taiwan.

Taiwan is only a couple hundred miles from the Chinese coastline, but over 6,000 miles from the continental United States. We are committed to defending Taiwan, but that begs the question: how can we defend Taiwan if China invades?

Add to that all of the war materiel we have sent to Ukraine, as well as just left behind in Afghanistan, and we are simply unprepared to do what it would take to defend Taiwan. China could invade and occupy before we could get any substantial forces there. At that point, the problem is no longer the defense of Taiwan, but the liberation of Taiwan.

The last time the United States and Chinese military were in direct conflict didn’t produce an American victory, but a bloody stalemate around the 38th parallel in Korea, and in that instance, American forces were already strongly in place in Korea before China sent its ‘volunteers’ across the Yalu River. The only good result of the Korean War was that my parents met in Tokyo!

The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has over two million trained men and women on active duty. Ground troops make up the bulk of the army with 965,000 soldiers, while the navy has 260,000 members and the air force 395,000. There is also a strategic missile force of 120,000 and a paramilitary arm with 500,000 soldiers.

Our worldwide defense commitments were made when we were by far the world’s strongest nuclear power, but now both the Soviet Union Russia and China have nuclear forces capable of completely obliterating our country, and we have no way to stop them other than our own deterrent forces.

Biden, at the fundraiser on Tuesday night local time, said that Xi was embarrassed over the recent tensions surrounding a suspected Chinese spy balloon that had been shot down by the Air Force over the East Coast.

“That’s a great embarrassment for dictators. When they didn’t know what happened,” Biden said.

LOL! It was a great embarrassment for the United States that we allowed the thing to cross the entire US before shooting it down. If anything, it showed President Xi that Mr Biden lacked decisiveness and resolve.

Will China invade Taiwan? We know neither if nor when such would happen, and, supposedly, China is building up its military even more before such action would be seriously contemplated, but it could also happen tomorrow. China has certainly been pushing the envelope with what appear to be deliberate provocations, but insulting the Chinese leader when you have your top diplomat in Beijing, trying to reach a less tense accommodation is pretty much what I’d expect from the dummkopf from Delaware.

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Karen wants to know if you have a gun

It was sometime in 2014, at a physician’s appointment when I still lived in Pennsylvania. The nurse came in to take my vital signs and ask the usual questions about my health. Then she asked me if we had any firearms in the house. I responded that such was none of the doctor’s or her business, and that I found the question offensive.

Now comes this from The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Before playdates, ask about guns at home | Expert Opinion

As a pediatrician and a parent, I approach the question of gun ownership by focusing on general safety. I ask about guns in the same breath as I ask about car seats, pools, and food allergies.

by Katie Lockwood, For The Inquirer | Tuesday, June 20, 2023 | 5:00 AM EDT

Sending your kid on a playdate at a friend’s house? The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that you ask whether the family has guns at home.

And at this point, I recommend that the American Academy of Pediatrics take a long walk off a short pier.

One out of three homes with kids has guns, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. Of those, only one out of five homes lock up their guns and store ammunition separately.

If you live in foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia, and Dr Lockwood, “a pediatrician with the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and associate professor of pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania,” must either live in Philly or at least reasonably close by, and ought to know that Philadelphians have sought concealed carry permits in huge numbers due to the terrible murder rate, and if you have a firearm for family or personal protection, the last thing you are going to do is “lock up (your) guns and store ammunition separately.” When some crazed junkie is trying to break in, or the gang-bangers are out shooting up the street and perhaps your home, when seconds count, the last thing you’ll find practical is having to unlock a safe for your weapons, or go to another room to get ammunition.

Yet the question often goes unasked because we don’t know how to broach a potentially awkward conversation. Others may assume their friends don’t own guns or, if they do, know how to store them safely.

So how do you ask the question? And what do you do if they have guns?

If people “don’t know how to broach a potentially awkward conversation,” could it possibly be because they realize that it’s none of their f(ornicating) business?

As a pediatrician and a parent, I approach the question of gun ownership by focusing on general safety. I ask about guns at the same time as I inquire about car seats, pools, and food allergies:

“Without judgment, wondering if you have any guns in your home? If so, I would ask that they are locked up and stored safely. Also, we don’t have any food or pet allergies. Looking forward to getting together!”

If I was a parent with a minor child in the City of Brotherly Love, I would not take my child to see Dr Lockwood. When a physician or his office inquires about firearms, they are entering the information into your medical records, and, with the HITECH Act of 2009, which mandates that medical records be digitized, ostensibly so that other physicians can access your records if needed, it also creates a record that the federal or state government could search, a backdoor way of instituting gun registration. Pennsylvania does not maintain a firearms registry, and under Pennsylvania 18 § 6111.4, neither the state, nor any local government, nor any law enforcement agency in the Commonwealth can maintain a firearms registry.

And if pediatricians are asking children about whether their parents have firearms, without their parents present, those pediatricians should be sued into penury.

Of course, you can’t trust the government when it comes to firearms. William Teach noted, on June 18th, that:

armed IRS agents rolled into Great Falls’ (Montana) Highwood Creek Outfitters Wednesday and seized dozens of boxes of ATF form 4473s, the background check form containing information on gun purchasers.

The agents hit the store prior to regular business hours, KRTV reported.

Store owner Tom Van Hoose said, “At 7:30, I came in and they pulled in behind me with 20 heavily armed agents.”

Van Hoose believes his store is targeted because he sells guns the White House opposes: “I can only assume that it’s because of the style of weapons that we have and the press that’s so against them. The current administration seems to be hell-bent on getting those guns out of the hands of average Americans.”

The ATF form 4473 has a gun purchaser’s name, address, birthdate, state/city of birth, gender, social security number, and the serial number of any guns purchased in the store. The information is perfectly suited for use in a registry or registry database.

Montana neither requires the registration of firearms nor a permit to carry a concealed weapon.

As for asking parents of your kids’ friends, it’s pretty laughable. “Without judgment, wondering if you have any guns in your home?” Of course she’s exercising judgment; her entire article is an exercise in judgment. The only surprising thing is that her first name isn’t Karen. When Dr Lockwood continues, if someone answers affirmatively that they have a firearm, “I would ask that they are locked up and stored safely,” she’s telling the person asked, ‘If your weapons are not locked away to where they are useless, my kid ain’t coming to your place!’

Before hosting a playdate, I volunteer this information, hoping to destigmatize and normalize asking:

“Hello! Just so you know, we are a smoke-free, gun-free home with a dog and two cats. We don’t have a pool, but bring some boots for muddy play in the creek with adult supervision. Looking forward to seeing you soon.”

I doubt many of the bad guys read the Inquirer, so Dr Lockwood is almost certainly safe, even after having told everybody that there are no firearms in her home. But her statement, if it’s spoken in person the way she wrote it in her OpEd piece, sounds just so darned pretentious.

Dr Lockwood is, of course, a free human being, with the same freedom of speech as anyone else, and if she wishes to stick her nose into other people’s business ask other people if they own firearms, she is perfectly within her rights. But I, too, am a free human being, with my own free speech rights, and it is my right to urge people to react negatively to the question she wants other to ask.

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Karma! The enemy of your enemy is not always your friend In a time when the left are all for 'diversity,' they have exactly zero diversity of thought or understanding.

How many times have conservatives noted that the Muslims, primarily the Palestinian Arabs, the liberals and homosexual lobbies supported because they opposed Israel, were not really their friends? Quietly and desperately they tried to ignore the fact that homosexuals were executed by hanging in Iran, and by being thrown off tall buildings by Da’ish. But this happened in the good, old United States!

‘A sense of betrayal’: liberal dismay as Muslim-led US city bans Pride flags

Many liberals celebrated when Hamtramck, Michigan, elected a Muslim-majority council in 2015 but a vote to exclude LGBTQ+ flags from city property has soured relations

by Tom Perkins in Hamtramck, Michigan | Saturday, 17 June 2023 | 6:00 AM EDT

In 2015, many liberal residents in Hamtramck, Michigan, celebrated as their city attracted international attention for becoming the first in the United States to elect a Muslim-majority city council.

They viewed the power shift and diversity as a symbolic but meaningful rebuke of the Islamophobic rhetoric that was a central theme of then Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign.

This week many of those same residents watched in dismay as a now fully Muslim and socially conservative city council passed legislation banning Pride flags from being flown on city property that had – like many others being flown around the country – been intended to celebrate the LGBTQ+ community.

Muslim residents packing city hall erupted in cheers after the council’s unanimous vote, and on Hamtramck’s social media pages, the taunting has been relentless: “Fagless City”, read one post, emphasized with emojis of a bicep flexing.

“The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” as the ancient saying goes. But, as our friend, the Soviet Union, helped the West finish off our enemy, the Third Reich, the Soviets quickly proved that, without that common enemy, they were not our friends. For the liberals in Hamtramck, the Muslims were their friends; for the Muslims in Hamtramck, the liberals were their useful idiots.

Homosexual activity has been widely condemned under Islam, and even a pro-homosexuality site notes the problems. Some try to argue that the Quran is at least somewhat ambiguous on the subject, but it is clear that the Islamic nations of the world interpret their faith as being strenuously opposed to homosexuality, and homosexual activity is a criminal offense across much of the Islamic and African nations.

In a tense monologue before the vote, Councilmember Mohammed Hassan shouted his justification at LGBTQ+ supporters: “I’m working for the people, what the majority of the people like.”

While Hamtramck is still viewed as a bastion of multiculturalism, the difficulties of local governance and living among neighbors with different cultural values quickly set in following the 2015 election. Some leaders and residents are now bitter political enemies engaged in a series of often vicious battles over the city’s direction, and the Pride flag controversy represents a crescendo in tension.

“There’s a sense of betrayal,” said the former Hamtramck mayor Karen Majewski, who is Polish American. “We supported you when you were threatened, and now our rights are threatened, and you’re the one doing the threatening.”

Could none of the non-Muslim liberals in that town read? Did none of them even wonder if the hostility to homosexuality in the Islamic world might be part of the culture of the Muslims in Hamtramck?

But it’s not only the left in Hamtramck who have deluded themselves. From The Victory Girls:

Feminism: Why The West Is Silent On Iran

by Lisa Carr | Sunday, June 18, 2023

We will attempt, once again today, to illustrate how feminism in the West has lost its way. Today, we look back on this very day in 1983, where 10 women from the ages of 17 to 57 years old were hung in an Iranian prison.

Why were they given such a horrific death sentence? Because these women were members of The Bahai Faith. They were told to renounce their religion or die. The Washington Examiner‘s Joseph D’Souza, provided an interesting commentary on the silence this past weekend:

Iranian women face daily threats of violence. More than 50 girls schools across Iran have suffered from apparent poisonings. Just last week, Iran put on trial the brave female reporters who visited Mahsa Amini in prison and told the whole world what the regime had done to her.

Women in the West have rightly asserted their own dignity and rights for decades. Can those same women not raise their voices louder in support of Iranian women and their quest for the same rights and dignity?

They must forcefully call on their governments not only to speak up but to take action on behalf of Iranian women. Tweets are not enough. They don’t create justice, tolerance, harmony, and human rights.”-Joseph D’Souza, The Washington Examiner

Women are still protesting in Iran. The violence is still happening. According to this from PBS, The Iranian government has detained over 20,000 protesters and killed more than 500, according to Human Rights Activists in Iran, a group that has been tracking the movement. Since November, a string of suspected poisonings has taken place at more than 50 girls’ schools across the country. Iran has also since banned women who refuse to wear the hijab from health and education services.

But in our “educated” country, our Land of Opportunity, our brand of “feminism” looks different. The plight of Iranian women and women in other, oppressive cultures is largely ignored. Why? Because Western feminists are a bunch of narcissistic twits who can’t be bothered to face the inconvenient truths of what is happening in the world around them.

“(N)arcissistic twits,”? Perhaps, but I believe that ignorant twits, twits who cannot see outside of their Western civilization mindset, who simply cannot wrap their heads around the concept that not everybody in the world thinks as Westerners in general, and Americans specifically, think. Because the American and western European left have swallowed the concern for the plight of the Palestinian Arabs not just hook, line, and sinker, but the fishing rod as well, all the way down to the reel, because they are so wholly anti-Israel — though don’t you dare call them anti-Semitic! — they must support the Arabs, and the Muslims, even though a Western woman walking down the streets of Tehran or Riyadh in typical Western women’s garb would be snatched up by the police and hauled off to jail, to treatment which would be less gentle than an American jail. A Western woman outspoken about the freedom to be lesbian in those countries might well find herself facing decades in prison.

There’s a lot more at Lisa Carr’s original, and there’s no paywall on The Victory Girls, so you can check out the whole thing for free. But it just helps to illustrate that inward thinking of the left, how they just can’t understand how anyone could think or believe differently from them. In a time when the left are all for ‘diversity,’ they have exactly zero diversity of thought or understanding.

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What hath progressives wrought?

There is a cat food dish on the front porch of our house, because our two cats are both outside and indoor critters. A dozen feet in front of the porch is the fence line, which has plenty of foliage, from bushes all the way up to two walnut trees. It was November of 2018 when I noticed that a feral cat had made his home under those bushes, because he was living close to the food we put outside.

It took a few weeks before I could even approach the feral cat, but he eventually got used to me, and while he didn’t let me pet him, he would stop running away when I went out to fill the dish. Then, one very cold December morning, I went out with a scoop of food to fill the dish, and he was so hungry that he started eating even as I was putting the food in the dish. On impulse, I reached down, grabbed him, brought him inside immediately, and plopped him down in a chair in front of the fireplace.

“Ooooh, I like this,” the feral cat thought, and with that, Wild Thing just plain moved in. The moral of the story is simple: if you feed them, they will come!

Subscriptions to The Wall Street Journal are expensive, but many times you will find things in the Journal that the mostly liberal professional media will not publish, as Editorial Board member Allysia Finley does something really radical like tell readers the truth:

The Root Causes of San Francisco’s Disorder

Covid lockdowns hastened the city’s decline, but it won’t recover as long as it clings to progressive obsessions.

by Allysia Finley | Sunday, June 18, 2023 | 3:42 PM EDT

Author Shelby Steele and his son, Eli, were filming a documentary in San Francisco last week when someone broke into their rental car. “In the 10 minutes we were gone our SUV was broken into and nearly $15k of cameras stolen,” Eli tweeted. “Called 911 & they hung up twice.”

Welcome to another day ending in the letter Y in San Francisco.

For those of you stymied by the Journal’s paywall, you can read the article for free here, though the internal hyperlinks are not included.

“Many Twitter employees feel unsafe coming to work in downtown SF and have had their car windows smashed,” Elon Musk tweeted in response. “They also got such a null response from the police that they rarely even bother reporting crimes anymore, because nothing happens.”

It’s more accurate to say the police response depends on the identities of the victim and perpetrator. In January, Shannon Collier Gwin, a 71-year-old art-gallery owner, was arrested for spraying a hose at a homeless woman camped in front of his business. The woman often had been heard screaming in the middle of the night.

“I completely broke,” Mr. Gwin said in an apology. “I am not equipped or trained to deal with a citywide problem like this.”

There was a double episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, “Past Tense,” in which Captain Sisko, Lt Commander Jadzia Dax, and Dr Julian Bashir wound up time traveled back to San Francisco in 2024. Messrs Sisko and Bashir are found by a pair of police officers, who believe them to be vagrants and warn them to get off the streets. They are escorted to a “Sanctuary District”, a walled-off ghetto that is used to contain the poor, the sick, the mentally disabled, and anyone else who cannot support themselves. A Journal commenter named Brent Law suggested:

Take the empty buildings (hotels, offices, etc) and make SF one giant homeless shelter. Move all those crossing our border illegally as well as the country’s homeless into these makeshift homes. Fence the place in and then take a page from the Left’s playbook by declaring victory.

Not too far off from Deep Space Nine, huh?

Neither, it seems, are the city’s politicians. The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem. Yet San Francisco’s leaders refuse to acknowledge how their own policies have caused the spiral of public disorder that’s driving away businesses and residents in droves.

And here is the lesson of Wild Thing: if a city makes it easier for the homeless and the junkies to survive, allowing them to camp out wherever they choose, providing food and shelter and other services, the derelicts will flock to that city. Because of the policies of the oh-so-compassionate left, rather than solving the problems of homelessness and drug abuse, they have enabled more of it, to the point at which they have grown and festered, and are driving decent people and good businesses — and the taxes they pay — out of what was once one of America’s greatest cities.

The political leaders of the City by the Bay recognize the problems, because they hit them in the face, every day. The part that they don’t get is that their policies are responsible. But that’s hardly surprising: we see the same thing from the liberal Democrat leaders in New York City, Philadelphia, Washington, St Louis, Baltimore, Chicago, and Los Angeles . . . and that list is not exclusive.

According to MediaFeed, Baltimore ranks 23rd and St Louis 14th — the only two US cities on the list — of the 25 highest murder rates in the world. Most of the other cities are in Venezuela, Brazil, and Mexico.

Add to this list the Westfield San Francisco Centre, whose owners last week handed their property to their lender. “A growing number of retailers and businesses are leaving the area due to the unsafe conditions for customers, retailers, and employees, coupled with the fact that these significant issues are preventing an economic recovery of the area,” the mall’s owner said last month after the center’s Nordstrom store announced it is closing.

Nearly half of the mall’s retailers have closed since 2020 as San Francisco has lost some 7.5% of its population—a larger share than any other major city. Those leaving are by and large affluent. According to Internal Revenue Service data, about 14,700 San Francisco taxpayers with an average adjusted gross income of $415,000 moved to other states in 2020 and 2021. Tens of thousands more flocked to Bay Area exurbs.

It ought to be so simple that even a liberal could understand it: law-abiding people, taxpaying people, mostly want to go to and from work safely, and live where the streets aren’t littered with derelicts and drug addicts, human poop and used needles. But because the progressive mindset is to not clean up the streets and remove the homeless and the junkies, because, well, just because.

The Journal article continues, to note that the COVID-19 lockdowns exacerbated the problems in an unexpected way: once the people who could work remotely, a population which included some of the city’s better-paid workers, they had little desire to return to, or if they had stayed in ‘Frisco, remain in that jungle of junkies.

The lockdowns remained in force until May of 2021, 14 months rather than the fifteen days to flatten the curve, and many people found out that they could make just as much money, progress in their careers, much further away from the city’s crime, ridiculous housing costs, and higher taxes.

The city has long been grungy, but the blight and crime worsened during the pandemic as city officials reduced the jail population by about 40% by releasing hundreds of inmates—never mind that they were far more likely to die of drug overdoses on the streets than of Covid in their cells. Meantime, the city encouraged the homeless to isolate in hotels by offering them free booze and marijuana. “They’re doing San Francisco a great service by staying inside,” one city official said. “We’re saying, ‘We’re doing what we can to support you staying inside and not have to go out and get these things.’”

Yet they still went out and got “things.” At least 18 homeless people died of drug overdoses in one hotel alone. Hotel damage from vagrants has cost the city roughly $44.5 million in settlement payments, which the city is asking the Federal Emergency Management Agency to reimburse. Some hotels have fallen into such disrepair that even many of the city’s homeless are refusing offers to be put up there.

Let’s tell the truth here: everything they did, everything!, was the wrong thing to do. The Journal goes on to tell us that while other cities have mostly returned to pre-panicdemic hotel and other business levels, San Francisco has not . . . and some hotel and building owners have simply walked away from their mortgages, seeing little hope that things will ever recover.

Therein lies the root cause of San Francisco’s public disorder. The city won’t recover unless its leaders get over their neurotic obsession with eliminating wealth.

The author might have been a little bit hyperbolic with that one, because the political leaders aren’t trying, in their minds, to eliminate wealth, but are so deceived by their own biases that they think government largesse for the poor will make everyone wealthy, while ignoring the signs, all around them, that the wealthy will protect what they have rather than let the government make them poor, and that giving free stuff to the deliberately poor simply enables them to survive while destitute.

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There is a Faustian bargain out there, that the reasonably well-to-do left just don’t understand. Reasonably hard-working themselves, providing decent lifestyles for their families and themselves, it is simply outside their paradigm that some people could choose to remain destitute as long as they could still survive rather than get off their asses and work. The well-to-do liberals can be comfortable in saying that marijuana isn’t harmful, without being able to wrap their pumpkin heads around the concept that alcohol and drugs can be addictive, and can rob the addicts of any real free will.

So, many who could take their money and flee have done just that. As nice as California’s climate can be — another magnet for the derelicts, not too hot and not too cold — there are plenty of other nice places to live. California has actually lost population, with nearly 700,000 more people moving out than moved in to the Pyrite State, even though The Los Angeles Times doesn’t see that as a problem. Of course, California is the nation’s capital of self-delusion.

The Deep Space Nine episodes describing the city’s ‘Sanctuary District’ are set next year. I can understand that, in 1994, when the episodes were written and produced, thirty years into the future was unknowable. California was, at the time, nearing the end of Republican Governor Pete Wilson’s first term — he would be re-elected in 1994 — following eight years under Governor George Deukmejian, another Republican, and the state was perceived as somewhat liberal, but not wild-eyed whacko leftist.

Who knows? Perhaps the writers of the episodes, Ira Behr and Robert Wolfe, figured that it was evil Republican, conservative policies which would lead to a semi-concentration camp existence for the poor, but the state has suffered the ills it has not under evil reich-wingers, but a super-majority of ‘progressive’ elected officials. The Fool’s Gold State won’t establish a ‘sanctuary district’ to house the destitute and the junkies — the Deep Space Nine episodes did not mention drug addicts, which would have been horribly, horribly politically incorrect, just the poor and unemployed — but the city’s and state’s policies are slowly turning all of San Francisco into its own sanctuary district, not by walling in the destitute, but by pushing out the hard-working and productive people.