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When you don’t tell the truth at first, don’t be surprised if fewer people believe you later When it comes to COVID-19, if we had been told the truth all along, people wouldn’t be doubting the government’s word!

My good friend William Teach of The Pirate’s Cove noted that the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, sitting in full on an appeal of a ruling by a three-judge panel, blocked President Biden’s mandate that all federal employees must be vaccinated against COVID-19.

Mr Teach’s money line:

And, even with the mandate, people who got vaxxed were still getting COVID and still dying.

And this was the entire problem. If the ‘vaccines’ had actually been vaccines, had actually prevented the vaccinated from contracting COVID-19, vaccine resistance would have vanished. But it wasn’t long after the ‘vaccines’ became available to everyone that we started to hear reports of ‘breakthrough’ cases, of people who had been fully vaccinated — defined at the time as 14 days past their second dose of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines — contracting the Peking pox. Continue reading →

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The truth will set you free In the end, the truth will always assert itself

I asked the question previously: If someone was out to destroy transgender acceptance, what would he be doing differently? I was referring to the University of Pennsylvania’s ‘transgender woman’ swimmer Will Thomas, the male swimmer who ‘transitioned’ to female, goes by the name “Lia,” and joined UPenn’s women’s swimming team, and won several Ivy League events. All of Mr Thomas’ victories against real women carry with them the unwritten asterisk: a guy was beating up on girls. Now, we have another example:

‘Tiffany’ Thomas won a bike race. Photo via Daily Mail. Click to enlarge.

Controversial trans athlete, 46, wins women’s NYC cycling race and says she feels like a ‘superhero’ – as critics warn ‘women’s rights in America are being destroyed’

  • Tiffany Thomas, 46, dominated the field in an NYC cycling race at the weekend

  • She took up the sport aged 40 before quickly finding success

  • Her success has been criticized amid claims trans athletes hold an unfair advantage in women’s sports

by Will Potter | Wednesday, March 22, 2023 | 9:24 PM EDT | Updated: Thursday, March 23, 2023 | 8:10 AM EDT

A transgender cyclist won first place at a female race in New York City amid ongoing debates over the inclusion of trans athletes in female competitions.

Tiffany Thomas, 46, who was born male, ended the Randall’s Island Crit cycling race atop the podium, blowing the competition out of the water to snatch first place.

Despite only taking up cycling in 2018, Tiffany quickly found success and has dominated competitions in the years since. She recently landed a place on top cycling team LA Sweat, where her oldest teammate is just 32.

There’s more at the original, and it is not hidden behind a paywall, so you can read it anytime. While The First Street Journal always uses the pronouns which refer to a person’s biological sex, and proper name at birth if we can fine it, when it comes to the ‘transgendered,’ I do not change the direct quotes of other sources.

Also read: William Teach, Groomer Groups Sue To Stop Florida’s Ban On Child Mutilation Medical Procedures

The Pico family love watching European bicycle races, at least as much for the scenery as the races themselves; they’re like vicarious vacations, and the recently completed men’s and women’s road races starting and also ending in Siena, Italy were certainly special, as we saw places we’ve personally been.

While the number of ‘trangender women’ participating in women’s sports has been small, and make a mockery of them trying to actually fit in as the women they claim to be, what about those who don’t take actions which differentiate themselves from real women? Jaron Bloshinsky, now known by the fake name Jazz Jennings, tried being a girl from well before puberty, with the assistance of his parents. Through the use of ‘puberty blocking’ medications, young Mr Bloshinsky never went through male puberty, as Will and ‘Tiffany’ Thomas did, trying, with the guidance of his ‘parents,’ to avoid the differentiation from girls that male puberty would have made much more obvious. Thanks to a tip from Robert Stacy McCain, I found this article, one definitely not in the credentialed media, since they have swallowed transgenderism hook, line, and sinker:

‘I Just Want to Feel Like Myself,’ Tearfully Admits America’s Most Famous ‘Trans Kid’ Jazz Jennings

By Megan Fox | Tuesday, March 21, 2023 | 9:45 AM EDT

There are a lot of deeply disturbing and unlikeable members of the trans cult. Jazz Jennings is not one of them. He was transitioned by his mother at the tender age of five. By the age of eleven, Jazz was on puberty blockers. At 17, even though a minor, Jazz underwent multiple genital surgeries to remove his penis and have it inverted. This process was botched and several attempts were made to remedy it, but the reduced size of Jazz’s penis due to years on puberty blockers made an already brutal surgery even worse. Continue reading →

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Killadelphia: Everyone wants to talk around the problem, without ever telling the truth

There are dozens and dozens of suggestions on how to reduce crime, but there is one way which actually does work: locking up the criminals that are caught for as long as the law allows, because the criminal who is behind bars is not out on the streets able to commit more crimes. But somehow, some way, that very simple logic has escaped the good citizens of the City of Brotherly Love. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Gun violence can affect every part of Philly life. Here’s how residents suggest solving it.

Philadelphians are “tired of looking over their shoulder.” Some want to leave the city altogether.

by Ellie Rushing and Nate File | Monday, March 20, 2023 | 5:00 AM EDT

Joshua Sanchez was leaving his bank one day in North Philly when a group of men with guns swarmed him. They robbed him, he said, then shot him once in the back before fleeing.

“It’s still there,” Sanchez, 38, said of the bullet, which is lodged too deep and close to his spine for doctors to remove.

Three years later, he’s tried to move his life forward, but gun violence remains a looming threat. Sanchez hears shots at home and at job sites, where he works in property maintenance. The danger often feels overwhelming, the lifelong Philadelphian said. He worries that if he stays much longer, he or his son may not survive.

“I just put my house up for sale,” he said. “I’m getting out of Philadelphia.”

He wouldn’t be the first. The 2020 Census put the population of Philadelphia at 1,603,797, but just a year later, the Census Bureau was guesstimating the city’s population as down to 1,576,251, a 1.72% population loss. More than a year later, the Census Bureau has still not updated its website to reflect its guesstimate for 2022 population.

Nearly 50% of Philadelphians in recent poll said that gun violence has had a major negative impact on their quality of life, per the Lenfest Institute for Journalism and research firm SSRS, and 64% of respondents said they have heard gunshots in their neighborhood in the last year.

This is the second time in a week in which I have seen the Leftist Lenfest Institute referenced in an Inquirer story, yet in neither the previous one, nor this, does the newspaper article point out that the Lenfest Institute owns the Inquirer. To cite something as though it is an outside source without that disclosure violates every standard of journalism of which I can think. The Lenfest Institute’s website doesn’t even mention that it owns the Inky on its main page, and you have to go down to a second section on its “About” page to see that acknowledged.

In interviews with nearly a dozen residents, people conveyed an ever-present fear of life in the city. Many said they’ve changed their habits in recent years as shootings have spiked, and now limit their time spent outdoors, especially at night. Mothers said they worry about their children anytime they leave home. Others, such as Sanchez, said they’d move out of Philadelphia if they had the resources.

“People are tired of looking over their shoulder,” said Jacob Green, 69, a poll respondent who’s saving up money to move from Mount Airy to North Carolina.

Then there was this tweet from WCAU-TV, Channel 10, the NBC owned-and-operated station in Philadelphia. District Attorney Larry Krasner apparently wants to give them their severe slaps on the wrist, and released a series of mugshots of homicide suspects. Given that many of the credentialed media journolists[1]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading have complained about Steve Keeley of Fox 29 News and his unsoftened coverage of crime in the city, they will doubtlessly be aghast that NBC10 put together this montage of the mugshots of the ten murder suspects, because nine of them are black, and one appears to be Hispanic, or “brown” as The Philadelphia Inquirer would call him. That the District Attorney had the police mugshots of nine of the ten suspects tells us that all but one had been previously arrested, which raises the obvious question: how many, if any, of these suspects could and should have been behind bars when they committed the murders of which they are accused?

More than that, in the linked story from NBC10, the mugshots of the ten suspects are all separate, but, for the tweet, the station put them all together, a montage of minority suspects.

As I guessed without looking first, the Inky didn’t have any of that on their website main page or specific crime page.[2]As of 10;10 AM EDT. The newspaper would much rather not show mugshots like that than help the police apprehend murder suspects.

Back to the original Inquirer article:

The poll also quantified a long-known fact of the crisis: Communities of color largely bear the brunt of it.

Black respondents were more than twice as likely to say that gun violence has seriously affected their quality of life, compared with white respondents. And across income levels, Black and Latino residents were more likely than white residents to report that they had heard gunshots in the last year.

So, while the Inky is willing to tell us that “(c)ommunities of color” are the primary victims of shootings and killings in Philly, the newspaper is unwilling to do anything to get identified and sought-after killers off the city’s streets. Got it!

The survey indicates that while 86% want improved relationships between the police and local communities, only 55% support increased funding for the Philadelphia Police Department. And the people of Philadelphia voted, by landslide margins in both the primary and general elections, in Philly’s most murderous year, 2021, to keep Let ’em Loose Larry Krasner as District Attorney.

Meanwhile, Margie Harkins, 63, a former X-ray technician who frequently worked with gun violence victims, said she wants to see stricter gun laws but knows that action must come from state leaders, not the city. But first, she said, the city must address the mindset of the people using guns.

“Why is everything settled by pulling a gun?” asked Harkins, a poll respondent from Southwest Philly.

Why? Because parents aren’t rearing their children properly, that’s why. With fathers absent or never known, and mothers trying to rear children on their own when there simply are not enough hours in the day to work and try to be both mother and father to their kids, with drugs rampant and a city that’s trying not to stamp out drugs but create ‘safe injection centers’, how can anyone expect anything other than savagery?

References

References
↑1 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.
↑2 As of 10;10 AM EDT.
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‘Progressive’ San Francisco defense attorney who wants to be District Attorney thinks people should just suck it up and accept crime to live in the city

Every once in a while, I come upon something which leaves me shaking my head. This is from John Hamasaki on Twitter. Mr Hamasaki is saying, basically, that in order to live in an urban environment, you must simply accept being a crime victim!

Mr Hamasaki is saying that a loss of “thousands of dollars” is pretty much just something you have to expect, and living in the suburbs, living somewhere more reasonably safe, shelters people so very much that they just aren’t tough enough for “city life.”

Of course, it is hardly just a “property crime” problem, as though the loss of property for which people worked hard to obtain — something else that’s part of “city life” — is mostly a nothingburger. Car break-ins have surged dramatically in Mr Hamasaki’s home town, but he doesn’t care. Catalytic converter theft is becoming more and more common, especially in states where emissions testing is required as part of an annual inspection, and they can cost up to $3,500 to replace. If you live in Philadelphia, where the median household income is $52,649, that’s a big chunk of change, though as a criminal defense attorney in San Francisco, perhaps it’s not quite as big a chunk of change for him. As a candidate to replace ousted San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, he had the support of the same ‘progressive’ allies — translation: soft on crime — as the recalled Mr Boudin.

Car thefts have increasingly become carjackings, because newer vehicles require a separate key fob for the vehicle to start, and the easiest way to get that is to hijack the car while the owner is present with the fob. Of course, carjackings are robberies by force, most frequently armed carjackings in which owners are confronted with a gun in their faces.

The bad guys don’t always stick with simple larceny. The crime wave which really got started in 2020 is a huge murder rate as well. Mr Hamasaki believes that you’ve got to be tough to live in the city? Well, in Pennsylvania, the homicide rate for the 65 counties which did not include Philadelphia and Pittsburgh increased by 1.18% between 2018 and 2021, while in Allegheny County — Pittsburgh — it jumped 33.77%, and in Philly, a whopping 59.21%. 54.72% of all murders in Pennsylvania occurred in Philadelphia, which has just 12.37% of the commonwealth’s population. With 78.11% of the state’s population, the counties outside of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh saw only 33.30% of the killings.

Mr Hamasaki complained that those of us who complain about unchecked crime simply hate cities. No, it’s what our major cities have become that people hate. But when kids get gunned down near their schools in targeted gang hits, and city parents refuse to send their kids to those schools, it’s people in the cities themselves who are concerned and scared. When applications for concealed carry permits more than sextupled in Philly, it’s not because people aren’t ‘tough enough’ for ‘city life,’ but because they’re just plain scared.

Robert E Howard, the 1930s author of the Conan stories, wrote in the Tower of the Elephant, “Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.” Mr Hamasaki appears to be sanctioning the new savagery in our cities, without realizing that it can get your skull split, in the more modern form of getting your brains blown out by a Glock 9mm.

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The Feds admit it: they are trying to force guilty pleas by the Capitol kerfufflers through intimidation

The money line was six paragraphs down:

Prosecutors are hopeful many will be incentivized to plead to help manage the crush of cases.

“The crush of cases”? Yup, you guessed it, this is a reference to the ridiculous prosecution of the Capitol kerfufflers, the out-of-control fraternity keg party in the Capitol on January 6, 2021. With almost a thousand people already charged, the Justice Department wants to charge maybe another thousand people. From The Washington Post:

The Jan. 6 investigation is the biggest in U.S. history. It’s only half done.

Nearly 1,000 people have been charged to date, and a federal courthouse strains to handle what may be years more of trials

By Spencer S. Hsu, Devlin Barrett and Tom Jackman | Saturday, March 18, 2023 | 9:00 AM EDT

The city’s federal court system is bracing for many years more of trials stemming from the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, with new charges possible against as many as 1,000 more people. Continue reading →

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“I’ll take ‘Things you won’t find in the Inquirer’ for $200, Alex.”

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain: Journalists Against Journalism: Reporter in Crime-Ridden Philadelphia Criticized for Reporting About City’s Crime Wave

As I’ve pointed out many times before, The Philadelphia Inquirer is our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, serving the nation’s sixth largest city and seventh largest metropolitan area, winner of twenty Pulitzer Prizes, the unofficial newspaper of record for the area, but they just don’t want to report the news!

Man Shoots Would-Be Car Thief During Gun Battle, Police Say

During the gun battle, the 18-year-old was shot four times throughout his body and collapsed to the ground after trying to flee, according to investigators.

By David Chang • Published March 16, 2023 • Updated on March 16, 2023 • 11:54 PM EDT

An 18-year-old man was shot four times after he got into a gun battle with the owner of the car he was trying to steal in Northeast Philadelphia, police said.

Police said the 18-year-old and a second suspect were trying to steal a Toyota sedan along the 4400 block of Princeton Avenue around 3:30 p.m. on Thursday. The two suspects went inside the car when the vehicle’s owner, a 26-year-old man, heard the commotion and exited his home, according to investigators.

Continue reading →

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WW3 Watch: Neocons who never served are calling an Iraq war veteran “chicken” because he doesn’t want the US involved in Ukraine

Governor Ron DeSantis (R-FL) served in the United States Navy, and his military record, via Wikipedia, is shown at the right. Not in combat himself, he nevertheless saw what happened to our soldiers and Marines in the meatgrinder that was Fallajuh.

Bill Kristol, born on December 23, 1952, is the son of Irving Kristol, who has been the managing editor of Commentary and founder of the magazine The Public Interest, “and was described by Jonah Goldberg as the ‘godfather of neoconservatism.’” A son of privilege, Mr Kristol was educated in a tony private school before matriculating to Harvard. In and around government for much of his career, and the author, with Lawrence Kaplan, wrote The War Over Iraq: America’s Mission and Saddam’s Tyranny, which Amazon describes as:

(T)o understand why we must fight Saddam, the authors assert, it is necessary to go beyond the details of his weapons of mass destruction, his past genocidal actions against Iran and his own people, and the U.N. resolutions he has ignored. The explanation begins with how the dominant policy ideas of the last decade–Clintonian liberalism and Republican realpolitik–led American policymakers to turn a blind eye to the threat Iraq has posed for well over a decade. As Kristol and Kaplan make clear, the war over Iraq is in large part a war of competing ideas about America’s role in the world. The authors provide the first comprehensive explanation of the strategy of “preemption” guiding the Bush Administration in dealing with this crisis. They show that American foreign policy for the 21st century is being forged in the crucible of our response to Saddam. The war over Iraq will presumably be the end of Saddam Hussein. But it will be the beginning of a new era in American foreign policy. William Kristol and Lawrence Kaplan are indispensable guides to the era that lies ahead.

One thing Mr Kristol did not do was ever serve in the military, though he has certainly been willing to send other people off to war. Continue reading →

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Once again, the #woke credentialed media don’t want to cover the story * Updated! *

As we reported on Saturday, some of the credentialed journalists, journolists as we see them, really don’t like it when other journalists do something really radical like report the facts. 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.

Yesterday, a 15-year-old Hispanic boy was shot and killed, shot ten times, making it an obvious hit, not far from Samuel Fels High School. Here’s the story from Fox 29 News:

Police: 15-year-old chased down Philadelphia street, shot to death in broad daylight

Published March 13, 2023 1:27PM | Updated 10:17PM

PHILADELPHIA – A 15-year-old is dead after police say he was chased down a Philadelphia street by a group of gunmen and shot at least 10 times. Continue reading →

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Trying too hard? The Philadelphia Inquirer tries to put lipstick on a pig.

As we have previously reported, the shooting of seven people near Strawberry Mansion High School has led parents of students at another school whose children were going to be transferred to Strawberry Mansion due to asbestos remediation to protest that vigorously, claiming that the Mansion was inherently unsafe. When the transfer actually happened, only 28 students actually showed up at Mansion.

So now The Philadelphia Inquirer is telling us what a great school Strawberry Mansion is!

Strawberry Mansion High School continues to fight an old reputation. But students say the school is an oasis.

“We will meet our students where they are, and really work to get them to their highest potential,” Strawberry Mansion Principal Brian McCracken said.

by Kristen A Graham | Monday, March 13, 2023 | 5:00 AM EDT

When Patience Wilson shares with people that she attends Strawberry Mansion High School, they often shake their heads and tell her all the bad things they’ve heard about her school.

But Wilson, a smiley 17-year-old senior, knows the real Mansion, the one behind the hasty headlines and deep-seated stereotypes.

The real Mansion, she says, is different: a place where students can start on a path to a building trades career, partner with nonprofits, spend their lunchtime in clubs and activities, and have access to trips, career and technical education programs, college classes, and adults who surround them with expectations and supports and love — no matter where they’re coming from or how long they’re able to stay.

“People usually judge us based on what’s happened in the past. But they’re not focusing on what’s happening right now,” said Wilson.

Reporter Kristen Graham focuses on Philadelphia schools, and it’s a good thing that the newspaper has someone who does that with such a large public school system. Mrs Graham then began to tell us about the school’s problems:

For years, Strawberry Mansion has fought on several fronts: against the challenges of its surroundings (the neighborhood has the highest number of shootings this year in the city; a full 52% of children under 18 in the immediate area live in poverty, according to Philadelphia and federal data), against a mismatch between available funding and concentrated student need.

It’s coped with a system that, because it emphasizes choice, has made things tougher for comprehensive high schools, which accept all students who walk in the door. Less than 10% of the students who live in Mansion’s attendance zone go to the school, according to district data, and those who do tend to be the most vulnerable.

I’m actually impressed that these two paragraphs were placed where they were, fifth and sixth in the story, because much of the remainder of the story is extremely positive about the school itself. But when Mrs Graham tells us that the neighborhood has the highest number of shootings in the city so far this year — and plenty of them in previous years — one thing is obvious: the concerns that the Building 21 parents raised are valid: it doesn’t matter how great a school might be if the students are getting shot!

There are several more paragraphs telling readers — and the newspaper didn’t restrict it to subscribers only, so if you don’t have too many Inquirer story reads, you can access it online — what the school has been doing to try to be better, almost to the point of pro-Mansion propaganda, Mrs Graham comes to this point:

On paper, Mansion’s statistics are startling: By the district’s measure, last year, 41% of the school’s ninth graders were on track to graduation. Just 9% met state standards in reading, 2% in math.

But the intense needs of Mansion’s students mean those numbers require lots of context. Consider the student who’s never been identified as requiring special-education services but who reads at a second-grade level. Or the teen whose attendance and grades are spotty but recently had been removed from his family’s care and now lives with a foster family, whom the school can’t reach.

If fewer than half, barely 41%, of freshmen are on a path to graduation, a figure I find questionable if “(j)ust 9% met state standards in reading, 2% in math,” it’s difficult for me to see how the school is doing its job. If there are students, in a high school, who need “special education services” going unnoticed by teachers when reading at the “second-grade level,” how are readers supposed to believe that the teachers are doing a good job? How would the parents of the displaced Building 21 students ever think that Strawberry Mansion High School is a good place to send their kids even without the question of violence in the neighborhood?

You know, I get it: Mrs Graham wanted to inform readers of the good things happening at Mansion, and pointed out several things that are supposed to be good, about vocational education to get some students into trades which don’t require college, several things telling readers how hard the school under principal Brian McCracken is trying. But when fewer “than 10% of the students who live in Mansion’s attendance zone go to the school,” it’s an inescapable fact: parents and students, people who are most familiar with the neighborhood and the school, are voting with their SEPTA passes, voting against the place. With fewer than 10% of the students in the school’s attendance zone going there, is it any surprise that the parents of the Building 21 students don’t want their kids there?