You just can’t appease the mob

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J K Rowling, the celebrated author of the Harry Potter series of books, was reliably far-left. She wanted to support homosexual rights and declared that her character, Professor Albus Dumbledore, was homosexual, even though there was nothing about such in the books. I’m not sure how you make a fictional character homosexual, if there’s nothing about the character in the books, but it kind of falls into line with some ‘historians’ declaring that long-dead people such as King Richard Cœur de Lion must also have been homosexual.

But, alas! Miss Rowling couldn’t go far enough and declare that girls could be boys and boys could be girls, and the backlash has begun!

‘Harry Potter’ fans removing tattoos after J.K. Rowling’s trans comments

By Melkorka Licea | June 12, 2020 | 6:12 PM EDT | Updated 6:51 PM EDT

These “Harry Potter” tattoos have lost their magic.

Die-hard adult fans of the fantasy wizard franchise are rushing to rid themselves of their now-tainted ink in light of recent cringe-inducing comments made by J.K. Rowling about trans issues.

Bria Noone’s tatted tits

The author came under fire again this week for tweets insisting that “sex is real” and then publishing a lengthy — and controversial — personal essay doubling down on her views. The remarks left trans people and supporters incensed and wanting to de-Potter their lives. Rowling even called out some of the Potter purgers in her essay, saying that many had called “for my books to be burned, although one particularly abusive man told me he’d composted them.”

But some went a step further, taking measures to cover or completely remove via lasers their Harry Potter-inspired tattoos in the fallout.

Brooklyn resident Bria Noone, who was “obsessed” with “Harry Potter” for most of her childhood and adult life, decided to part ways with her “Deathly Hallows” symbol chest tattoo — which appears in the seventh book of the series.

There’s more at the original.

I’ll just say it: if you are dumb enough to get a Harry Potter symbol tattooed between your tits, no other stupidity on your part will surprise me. And if you’re dumb enough to believe that people can change their sex through hormones and surgery, well I guess that you’re dumb enough to do something like get a Harry Potter tattoo, so really, it all comes full circle.

Hard-hitting news from CNN!

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A tweet thread from Brian Stelter, Anchor of @ReliableSources and @CNN‘s chief media correspondent. Formerly @nytimes, @tvnewser and Top of the Morning.

As usual, I only copy and paste the first tweet in a thread, and then put the subsequent tweets in a transcript. This is the original link, in case it gets deleted.

Here’s a thread about how media sausage is made, pegged to my forthcoming book, HoaxTheBook.com.

For years, there have been rumors inside Fox about Sean Hannity’s personal life. Now that I’m fact-checking the book, the info is trickling out… (1/6)

A TV host’s personal life is not automatically newsworthy. But a relationship between two of Fox’s biggest stars? That’s newsworthy. Whispers about Hannity and Ainsley Earhardt have been widespread inside Fox for years, but never reported publicly. (2/6)

Last year, a source for my book mentioned Hannity was separated from his wife, assuming I already knew. Other sources confirmed it. Some said the gossip about Hannity & Earhardt was an “open secret,” so much so that “Fox & Friends” staffers wondered whether I’d report on it (3/6)

I’m in book fact-checking mode, so last Tuesday I spoke with Fox News PR about Hannity’s separation and the Earhardt whispers. I expected the info to leak in a way favorable to Hannity. Sure enough, Page Six ran a story revealing Hannity’s divorce the next day. (4/6)

The timing might have seemed odd to readers — “they have been legally divorced for more than a year,” so why is it reported now? Well now you know. I think it also explains today’s @gabrielsherman story saying Hannity is dating Earhardt. It’s a fact-checking domino effect. (5/6)

Per Page Six, “sources close to both Hannity and Earhardt deny they are a couple.” All this info is just a paragraph in my book “HOAX: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth,” coming August 25. BuyHoax.com. Now back to my fact-checking… (6/6)

Now, the purpose of Mr Stelter’s thread is obvious: to sell his book! And what better way to do it than through a titillating thread about who is sleeping with whom?

Mr Stelter declared that an affair between “two of Fox’s biggest stars” is newsworthy, which raises the obvious question: why is it newsworthy? For Entertainment Tonight or Page Six, yeah, I can see it, because that is what they do. But CNN, which purports to be a serious news network?

What, I asked Mr Stelter, did he say about MSNBC’s Morning Joe co-hosts, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski hooking up and eventually marrying; the now-Mrs Scarborough divorced her then-husband, James Patrick Hoffer, following the allegations of her affair with Mr Scarborough. What did he say about former Vice President Joe Biden’s son marrying his brother’s widow, then knocking up a stripper and trying to avoid paying child support, and then divorcing his first wife and marrying a third woman? What has Mr Stelter had to say about the practically incestuous reporting, with Chris Cuomo of CNN interviewing his brother, Governor Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) frequently concerning the Governor’s policies concerning COVID-19? New York Times executive editor A M Rosenthal fired allowed reporter Laura Foreman to resign after it was discovered that she was sleeping with married Pennsylvania state Senator Henry J. “Buddy” Cianfrani while she had been reporting on him for, at the time, The Philadelphia Inquirer, at which time Mr Rosenthal was quoted as saying, “If you sleep with the elephants, you can’t cover the circus.” The quotation has morphed a bit over time, but if anyone at CNN paid attention to Mr Rosenthal’s ethics, the younger Mr Cuomo wouldn’t be allowed to report on his older brother.

Of course, the Times itself loosened the reins a bit, when they allowed reporter Ali Watkins to stay on the job, simply reassigning her news beat, after it was discovered that she was sleeping with a source, a married man thirty years her senior.

President Trump has been able to establish the hashtag #FakeNews in large part because the credentialed media have been so biased, both subtly and blatantly. So many of them have massaged the truth and spun the truth rather than simply reporting it, that the claim of #FakeNews rings true. You have to read a lot, from multiple sources, and, of course, read The First Street Journal, if you want to finally get to the truth.
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Humorously Related Article:

Media bias can be very, very subtle

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Sometimes it only takes one little sentence to point out the bias, but you have to know what the truth is to spot it.

In the Lexington Herald-Leader story, “Pro-Trump? Anti-Trump? Attack ads cause whiplash on where Amy McGrath stands,” reporter Daniel Desrochers wrote:

The ads complicate things for McConnell, who has spent the last several months running ads touting McGrath as “further left” and “more progressive” than anyone in Kentucky.

If your only source of information was Mr Desrochers’ story, you might assume that such was Senator Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) description of Democratic candidate Amy McGrath Henderson’s¹ ideology. Given that the story is about the ads being run by two of Mrs Henderson’s opponents in the upcoming Democratic primary, which paint her as being too ‘moderate’ for Democratic voters — one ad by state representative Charles Booker, who was endorsed by the Herald-Leader — says that “Kentucky needs a real Democrat to take on Mitch McConnell” — it’s primarily a story about how Mrs Henderson’s opponents are trying to paint her. You wouldn’t know that Mrs Henderson was caught on tape stating, “I am further left, I am more progressive, than anyone in the state of Kentucky.”

Of course, that isn’t how she has been running her campaign. Here in the Bluegrass State, Mrs Henderson has been running a more ‘moderate’ campaign, because her campaign people are smart enough to know that while moderate Democrats have had some success in Kentucky, “progressive” ones have not, outside of a few smaller areas.

No, where Mrs Henderson made that statement was in a fundraiser,² in Massachusetts! for her unsuccessful campaign for the sixth congressional district seat in Kentucky.

Had Mr Desrochers written, “The ads complicate things for McConnell, who has spent the last several months running ads showing McGrath saying she was “further left” and “more progressive than anyone in the state of Kentucky,” it would have been 32 words, rather than the 27 he used, but it would have been far more honest.

Had I not already known about the tape of Mrs Henderson, first brought to Kentuckians’ attention during the 2018 campaign, then I would not have spotted what Mr Desrochers did.

Was it deliberate? Was it a change made by the editors rather than the writer? I don’t know, and it almost doesn’t matter. What does matter is that we have to be alert for those very subtle things, which may be true but are not the whole truth, that misinform or underinform or mislead consumers of the news. News stories do not have to be false to be biased.
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Cross-posted on RedState.
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¹ – Mrs Henderson hasn’t enough respect for her husband, Erik Henderson, to have taken his name, but The First Street Journal does not show similar disrespect, and always refers to married women by their proper names.
² – Mrs Henderson has been a fund-raising machine! She raised $8,542,352 for her 2018 congressional race, spending $8,274,396, leaving $267,956 cash on hand according to the 2018 year end report. Representative Andy Barr (R-KY 6th District) raised $5,238,577 spending $5,580,477, leaving $134,679 in cash on hand. Despite outspending Mr Barr by almost $3 million, she lost 51.0% to 47.8% in a closely watched race.

The abuse of power by the public education system

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That most public school teachers, their unions, and public school administrations have no regard at all for our Second Amendment rights is well known, but this pretty much takes the cake:

“I FELT VIOLATED”|Police Search Baltimore County House Over BB Gun in Virtual Class

by Chris Papst, WBFF Staff | Wednesday, June 10th 2020

BALTIMORE (WBFF) – A Baltimore County family is warning other parents after they say police were called to their house over something that happened during a virtual school lesson. The incident is raising concerns over privacy and safety in the era of online learning.

As a Navy veteran with four years of active duty, Courtney Lancaster has extensive knowledge of guns, how to use them and how to store them.

Her 11-year-old son, who owns BB guns, is a boy scout in fifth grade at Seneca Elementary School.

“He’s just a very intellectual child, but he’s all boy as well. He loves to be outside and play and ride his bikes and that sort of thing,” Courtney told Project Baltimore.

In his pursuit of becoming an Eagle Scout, Courtney says her son has learned how to shoot a BB gun and an airsoft gun. He’s also taken three levels of archery lessons. His mother says he stores his bow and guns on this wall in his bedroom. It’s never been a problem until June 1, when police pulled up outside her house.

There’s more at the original.

Mrs Lancaster made one serious mistake: when the police officers showed up, she allowed them to enter; she should have told them that they needed a warrant. Unfortunately, she apparently did not know exactly what was going on, so that’s 20/20 hindsight, but it would have been interesting to have the school system and the police have to explain to a judge why an arranged weapons rack in plain sight constituted probable cause to search a home.

The police were in her home for about twenty minutes and found no violations, no laws broken and no present dangers, and left without taking any action.

The real problem is that the public education system stuck it’s ugly nose into people’s private lives. “They” saw something they didn’t like, evil guns! and called the cops.

We have allowed the public education system far, far, far too much power and authority. This needs to be curtailed.

Лысéнковщина in America

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Thanks to my good friend Heather Long — OK, OK, we’ve never actually met — I found this article in The New York Times:

Economics, Dominated by White Men, Is Roiled by Black Lives Matter

The editor of a top academic journal is facing calls to resign after criticizing protesters as “flat earthers” for wanting to defund the police.

By Ben Casselman and Jim Tankersley | Published June 10, 2020 | Updated June 11, 2020, 7:51 AM EDT

The national protests seeking an end to systemic discrimination against black Americans have given new fuel to a racial reckoning in economics, a discipline dominated by white men despite decades of efforts to open greater opportunity for women and nonwhite men. . . .

Black Americans are vastly underrepresented among economics students and professors, a wide range of data have shown. There are no black editors of the most prestigious economics journals. There are no black professors in the main economics department at Chicago, Mr. Uhlig’s employer, which is one of the most storied departments in the country.

It has been many decades since last I was in college, but at least in the 1970s a student’s choice of major was exactly that: a choice. When the authors state that “Black Americans are vastly underrepresented among economics students,” are they not saying that black students have taken personal decisions to study something other than economics?

Actually, most white students also choose to study something other than economics; not for nothing is economics called the “dismal science“.

The phrase “the dismal science” first occurs in Thomas Carlyle’s 1849 tract called Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question, in which he argued in favor of reintroducing slavery in order to restore productivity to the West Indies:

Not a “gay science”, I should say, like some we have heard of; no, a dreary, desolate and, indeed, quite abject and distressing one; what we might call, by way of eminence, the dismal science.

Though easily looked up, few are aware of the term’s origin, and, given the silliness going on these days, it’s probably only that general ignorance which keeps every member of the field from being denounced as horribly raaaaacist for studying the dismal science, given Mr Carlyle’s advocacy of reintroducing slavery into the British West Indies.¹

But if few know the origin of the phrase, that the “dismal science” refers to economics is much more widely known, and it is hardly a surprise to me that students of all races mostly eschew it. Though my degrees are not technically in economics, I’ve enough economics courses to have constituted a third major in it, if the University of Kentucky’s College of Arts and Sciences had allowed it. My interest — pun very much intended — in economics came from the introductory course, at the time designated Econ 161, and how commercial banks created money. Once I got my head around that concept — it isn’t one which makes a lot of sense initially² — it was as though the light bulb went on; after that, economics concepts came easily to me.

Back to The New York Times:

A growing chorus of economists is seeking to dislodge the editor of a top academic publication, the University of Chicago economist Harald Uhlig, after he criticized the Black Lives Matter organization on Twitter and equated its members with “flat earthers” over their embrace of calls to defund police departments.

Days earlier, the profession’s de facto governing body, the American Economic Association, sent a letter to its members supporting protesters and saying that “we have only begun to understand racism and its impact on our profession and our discipline.” A group of economists, mostly from outside academia, last week hosted an online fund-raising effort for the Sadie Collective, an organization that aims to bring more black women into the field.

Black economists say the events have brought some progress to a field that has long struggled with discrimination in its ranks — and with a refusal by many of its leaders to acknowledge discrimination in the country at large. But the profession remains nowhere close to a full-scale shift on racial issues: On Wednesday, the director of the White House National Economic Council, Larry Kudlow, told reporters, “I don’t believe there is systemic racism in the U.S.”

Dr Uhlig made some statements which others have interpreted as racist or at least insufficiently sensitive to the #BlackLivesMatter #GeorgeFloyd protesters. He tweeted:

The transcript of his thread:

Too bad, but #blacklivesmatter per its core organization @Blklivesmatter just torpedoed itself, with its full-fledged support of #defundthepolice: “We call for a national defunding of police.” Suuuure. They knew this is non-starter, and tried a sensible Orwell 1984 of saying, oh, it just means funding schools (who isn’t in favor of that?!?).But no, the so-called “activists” did not want that. Back to truly “defunding” thus, according to their website. Sigh. #GeorgeFloyd and his family really didn’t deserve being taken advantage of by flat-earthers and creationists. Oh well. Time for sensible adults to enter back into the room and have serious, earnest, respectful conversations about it all: e.g. policy reform proposals by @TheDemocrat and national healing. We need more police, we need to pay them more, we need to train them better. Look: I understand, that some out there still wish to go and protest and say #defundpolice and all kinds of stuff, while you are still young and responsibility does not matter. Enjoy! Express yourself! Just don’t break anything, ok? And be back by 8 pm.

Figuring that it is possible that, in the fact of the backlash, Dr Uhlig will delete his thread, I thought that the transcript was necessary.

What did Dr Uhlig say that was so horribly offensive? In short, he told the protesters to grow the f(ornicate) up! He’s smart enough to understand that if we are stupid enough to ‘defund the police,’ the entire concepts of private property and individual liberties are gone, as your property may be seized and your rights violated by anyone with the strength or firepower to do so.

Not that I’m advocating it, mind you, but there would be one heck of a sense of schadenfreude if some armed bikers went into the police-free Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone and started just taking the protesters iPhones and laptops, and there’d be nothing the soy boy protesters could do about it. That’d teach them a hard lesson!

Of course, they should have already learned that lesson, as this now-protected tweet by lauracouç demonstrates: the people they thought would be their allies, weren’t. But if what they want are “vegan meat substitutes, fruits, oats, soy products, etc,” it kind of shows just what kind of people have ‘seized power’ in the ‘autonomous zone.’ They are the sheep who would be least able to survive without the police protecting them from people who didn’t care about them, from people who were willing to simply take what they wanted, from food to money to, let’s be honest about it, women.

The so-called ‘Summer of Love’ in San Francisco had a dark underside, which people didn’t want to see or think about. Since sex was ‘free love,’ women were simply expected to consent, and if they didn’t, for whatever reasons they had, some of them were just plain raped. That’s the kind of thing that can happen without the police.

Dr Uhlig called for these people who are purported to be adults to act like adults . . . and for that, other people, who are also purported to be adults, want to get the adult who gave adult advice fired.

Lacking any real evidence, Messrs Casselman and Tankersley had to dredge up something from when John Kennedy was President:

Economics has a history of discrimination and, in some cases, outright racism. George Stigler, a Nobel laureate and an early leader of the American Economic Association, criticized the civil rights movement in 1962 and wrote that African-Americans’ disadvantages in the labor market stemmed in part from their “inferiority as a worker.”

“Lacking education, lacking a tenacity of purpose, lacking a willingness to work hard, he will not be an object of employers’ competition,” he wrote.

OK, that’s something which would be considered pretty extreme today, but perhaps wasn’t when it was published 58 years ago. But the authors followed it up immediately with:

Few scholars today would use such language. But the ideas persist: Economics journals are still filled with papers that emphasize differences in education, upbringing or even IQ rather than discrimination or structural barriers.

Damon Jones, an economist at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy, says the lack of diversity in economics affects what is studied and how. “We study things that are related to race and racism all the time, but we are inclined to figure out what other explanations may be at play,” he said.

And there you have it: if you conflate “differences in education, upbringing or even IQ” with race, as Messrs Casselman and Tankersley did, then the solution to the problem can only be some form of Affirmative Action: they have to bring more black Americans into economics, even if not many black college students choose to study the dismal science. And if they can’t somehow equalize them number of black students who study economics, then they’ll just have to make sure that, out of that limited-in-size pool, those promoted, those who seek professorships and tenure are rewarded in greater numbers.

The Russian was Лысéнковщина, Lysenkoism, a political campaign led by Trofim Lysenko to curry favor with Josef Stalin, against genetics and science-based agriculture in the mid-20th century. More broadly, it was the politicization of science throughout the Soviet Union, where everything had to serve the political demands of the Communist Party.

And that’s what we are seeing here: academic research is being subjected not only to political correctness, something that has been happening for a while now, but now to #RacialJustice as well. Who cares if the research is good or the conclusions are right; if they aren’t expressed in fealty to #BlackLivesMatter and #RacialJustice, not only will the studies be trashed, but the activists will try to get the scientists fired.³
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¹ – The Abolition of Slavery Act was passed by Parliament in 1833, and given Royal Assent by King William IV. It took effect on August 1, 1834.
² – Economics 161: If Mr Smith has $1,000 in the bank, and Mr Jones comes in to borrow $200, due to reserve requirements, the amount of cash the bank must have on hand to meet withdrawals, the bank can lend Mr Jones $200 out of the $1,000 deposited by Mr Smith. Since Mr Smith still has $1,000 deposited, and Mr Jones now has $200, the bank has created $200. If Mr Jones deposits that $200 in the bank, bank records will then show $1,200 in the bank.
³ – Law professor William Jacobson noted today on Le*gal In*sur*rec*tion that There’s an effort to get him fired at Cornell for criticizing the Black Lives Matter Movement. It probably doesn’t help Professor Jacobson that he’s a Joooo who strongly supports Israel.

The Lexington Herald-Leader is way, way, way out of touch with its readers.

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I have some affection for the Lexington Herald-Leader, in that I delivered it for four years during junior high and high school. Alas! one would think that the newspaper would have at least some similarities to its delivery area, but it does not.

The Editorial Board published the following endorsement for the Democratic nomination to oppose Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) this fall:

Passion over pragmatism. Charles Booker gets our endorsement in U.S. Senate primary.

By Herald-Leader Editorial Board | June 9, 2020 | 12:30 PM EDT

The coronavirus currently devastating the United States and the world has drawn back the curtains on many of our most intractable problems: inadequate health care tied to lost jobs, low wages, underemployment, shaky safety nets in the richest nation on earth.

Our already fragile world is now rocked by protests and riots over police brutality, and the systemic racism and injustice it serves, from mass incarceration to murder. . . . .

I’m sorry, but what?

Kentucky is lucky to have a strong slate of candidates in the Democratic primary vying to take on the Senate Majority Leader in the November election. As they have shown in debates and in Zoom interviews with our editorial board, any one of them, Rep. Charles Booker, Mike Broihier or Amy McGrath, is qualified and ready to serve. But because now is the time for bold and brave ideas, we endorse Charles Booker in the primary.

You can read the rest by following the link.

The editors chose against Amy McGrath Henderson,¹ saying that she is “playing it safe as a moderate Democrat.” As we have pointed out previously, Mrs Henderson only plays a “moderate Democrat” within the borders of the Bluegrass State, having stated that “I am further left, I am more progressive, than anyone in the state of Kentucky,” at a fund-raising event in Massachusetts. Is she the moderate Democrats she has told the voters of Kentucky she is, or the far left progressive she told potential donors in one of our bluest states?

Instead, despite acknowledging Mrs Henderson’s fund-raising ability,² the editors opted to endorse the liberal black Democrat, noting his presence in the George Floyd protests in Louisville.

But let’s get real: while Democrats have had more success in Kentucky than other southern states, the successful ones outside of narrow liberal enclaves have at least pretended to be moderates. Kentucky really does not have a large black population: estimates put the white population at 87.08%, black at 7.98%, biracial at 2.25% and Asian at 1.41%. The Bluegrass State is not exactly a fertile field for liberal black candidates.³

If Mrs Henderson would still have been the underdog in a general election campaign against Senator McConnell, Mr Booker wouldn’t be seen as having much more than a ghost of a chance. Perhaps the editors have already conceded the race to Mr McConnell? 🙂

My unfortunately deceased best friend used to refer to the newspaper as the Herald-Liberal, with good reason: the paper always supports Democratic candidates who are simply out of the mainstream for very red state Kentucky. In 2016, they gave their hearty endorsement to Hillary Clinton, but Kentuckians gave 62.52% of their votes to Donald Trump; Mrs Clinton won only 32.68%, carrying only the two most urban counties, Jefferson (Louisville) and Fayette (Lexington). In the Senate race that year, the editors endorsed Lexington Mayor Jim Gray over incumbent Senator Rand Paul (R-KY); Mr Gray lost 57.3% to 42.7%.

The editors are simply out-of-touch with Kentucky’s voters. No wonder the newspaper’s parent company, McClatchy, filed for bankruptcy protection just four months ago, before COVID-19 hit the economy, and abandoned its own printing facilities in 2016, laying off 29 printing employees and eventually abandoning it’s landmark building on Midland Avenue.
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¹ -Mrs Henderson hasn’t enough respect for her husband, Erik Henderson, to have taken his name, but The First Street Journal does not show similar disrespect, and always refers to married women by their proper names.
² – Mrs Henderson raised $8,542,352 for her 2018 congressional race, spending $8,274,396, leaving $267,956 cash on hand according to the 2018 year end report. Representative Andy Barr (R-KY 06) raised $5,238,577 spending $5,580,477, leaving $134,679 in cash on hand. Despite outspending Mr Barr by almost $3 million, she lost 51.0% to 47.8% in a closely watched race.
³ – It should be noted that a conservative black Republican, Daniel Cameron, won the statewide election in 2019 to become the state’s Attorney General.

Real #RacialJustice requires stricter law enforcement, not soft-hearted thinking which leaves criminals free to prey on their neighbors

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Two wealthy white women want the City of Brotherly Love to raise their taxes because, racial justice! From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Mayor Kenney, please raise our taxes | Opinion

Hillary Blecker and Sarah Burgess, For The Inquirer | Updated: June 9, 2020 – 6:47 AM

We are two wealthy, white Philadelphians who, from inheritance and salaries, have financial security during this precarious time. Looking at Mayor Kenney’s gutted city budget proposal, we say to the mayor: tax us more.

First, my apologies: this article is hidden behind the Inquirer’s paywall, through which I cannot get on my desktop, but which I could read on my iPhone via Twitter. Any mistakes you might see in the article text are the fault of my transcription, not the original. I haven’t been able to add the internal hyperlinks.

We’ve often heard politicians say that while they support social services, their hands are tied because money is scarce. But when wealth inequality in our country continues to widen, can we really claim scarcity as the problem?

Budgets are moral documents that reflect our values. As wealthy Philadelphians who benefit from an unjust economic system, the moral logic couldn’t be more obvious: those who have more should pay more to meet the needs of all.

There is nothing, of course, which prevents the authors from giving more, giving away every last penny of their salaries and inherited wealth to the city, or directly to whatever social programs they believe would be of the most help. But no, they want to force everybody of means to have to contribute to what they see as socially imperative.

We reject the current budget proposal, which increases spending for the police while severely cutting other services. Our city has continuously disinvested in poor communities, which are, based on racist policies from our past and present, primarily black. This has helped maintain a plurality black city that is still the poorest large city in the nation. And yet wealthy, mostly white people like us are offered tax breaks like the ten year tax abatement.

I would note here that the Democrats have ruled foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia for decades. The last Republican mayor, Bernard Samuel, left office on January 7, 1952, 68½ years ago, before I was born, and while George VI was still King of England.

Racist policies? Prior to Jim Kenney being elected in 2015, three of the previous four mayors, Wilson Goode, John Street and Micheal Nutter, each of whom served two four-year terms, were black. Why would the two wealthy ladies think that they led “racist policies” from the mayor’s office?

The word “taxes” is often thrown around as a dirty word. But we don’t see it that way. We want to live in a vibrant city that meets the needs and celebrates the talents of all of its residents: strong public schools, accessible and responsive health services, active public spaces like libraries, rec centers, pools and parks. We want the city to provide these services. If paying more in taxes helps provide them, why wouldn’t we want to contribute?

Well, that’s just it: they can “contribute,” all that they want, right up to the last euro of their personal wealth. But this is where they have conflated two words, taxes and contributions, as meaning the same thing; they do not.

We know many wealthy people, including ourselves, who give personally or through foundations as a way to distribute money. But this approach is piecemeal and anti-democratic. in contrast, paying taxes shifts power to all city residents to democratically elect officials who will make equitable decisions responsive to residents’ needs, and who can be held accountable if they don’t keep their promises.

With this, the two wealthy women have delved into the silliness of leftist ‘thought.’ It is “anti-democratic” for people of wealth to choose to donate money to whatever worthy causes they support, but somehow democratic to give to “all city residents” the authority to stick their hands more deeply into the pockets of the wealthy, to take the choice of donating more away from those who have the means, and giving it to others who will not personally feel the bite of higher taxes on the well-to-do?

And if Mrs Blecker and Mrs Burgess believe that the city has been under “racist policies” under both “past and present” regimes, why would they believe that turning this wealth over to “democratically elect(ed) officials” will result in “equitable decisions responsible to residents’ needs,” when those same “democratically elect(ed) officials” apparently have not done so in the past, according to the writers’ own claims?

The two affluent Philadelphians have apparently failed to persuade their wealthy friends to contribute enough, contribute as much as Mrs Blecker and Mrs Burgess believe they should, so, in the absence of their personal persuasive power, they would have the city government strong-arm them.

After some proposals on how to tax the top producers, the authors note with approval the proposals of Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti to cut the police budget, and “challenge (their) city leaders to take similarly bold steps in designing a budget that demonstrates a commitment to justice.”

A “commitment to justice”? Since 2016, the City of Brotherly Love has seen a steady rise in murders, something which had been declining under Mayor Nutter and Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey — both of whom are black — from 277 in 2016 to 356 last year, a 28.5% increase, and this current year has seen 176 homicides¹, a 26.6% increase over the same day in 2019, and if the racial makeup of the victims is similar to past years, the vast majority of the victims and their killers are black. In 2019, 85% of the murder victims were black, even though only 41.5% of the city’s population are black. Reducing law enforcement, which is what cutting the police budget means, can only result in further carnage among the black population of Philadelphia, and more murders who get away with their crimes. Should there be reduced justice for the victims of killers?

This is where there is a total disconnect between liberal and rational thought. The left appear to believe, in the wake of the George Floyd killing in Minneapolis, that police departments are all loaded with racists, and that the only solution to ‘racial injustice’ is to reduce, or even dismantle police departments. But lax policing, in Chicago, in Baltimore, in St Louis and in Philadelphia, has created far higher murder rates, with the majority of victims being black, than in stricter and larger New York City and the ‘broken windows‘ policing which began under Mayor Rudy Giuliani.² Philadelphia needs more police, not fewer, and stricter law enforcement, not easier. It should not be forgotten that the easier-going policies of the past led to chaos:

  • In 2007, Philadelphia Police Office Charles Cassidy was gunned down by Lewis Jordan, a.k.a. John Lewis, when the officer interrupted Mr Jordan attempting to rob a Dunkin’ Donuts. Mr Jordan had been treated leniently by then District Attorney Lynne Abraham’s department; he should have been in jail on a drug charge, but was allowed to live at home, with his mother, who was an armed corrections officer with a firearm at home.
  • On May 8, 2008, Officer Stephen Liczbinski was murdered by Howard Cain, as Mr Cain and his two accomplices were fleeing a bank robbery. Mr Cain had a long list of priors, and should have been in jail at the time.
  • On September 8, 2008, Officer Patrick McDonald was killed by Daniel Giddings, a felon who had been recently paroled early from prison, despite several prison discipline violations and a long list of prior offenses. He had been given half the sentence recommended by a prosecutor who said that it would never be safe to release Mr Giddings, and was released early from that.

Between 2007 and 2009, six Philadelphia Police officers were murdered in the line of duty, and every last one of them was killed by a criminal who had been treated leniently by the system. And just last year, six Philly police officers were wounded by career criminal Maurice Hill, who could, and should, have been in jail at the time, had soft-hearted and soft-headed Common Pleas Court Judge Rayford Means revoked his probation when brought before him thrice for probation violations.

The only way to seek real #RacialJustice is to take action to protect not only minority communities but all neighborhoods from being preyed on by criminals. Since the problems are more acute in heavily minority neighborhoods, this is where the emphasis should be; the problems should be addressed by police officers who know the neighborhoods, with police stations closer to, not further from, the areas with the greatest problems. Police officers patrolling Mt Airy and Chestnut Hill at the same rates as Strawberry Mansion would be a waste of time and resources.

The authors are hardly alone in this, but are symbolic of the disconnect from reality that embodies leftist thought today. The left appear to believe that all people are inherently good, and everything would be just peaches and cream if only the police weren’t such bad guys. In reality, a lack of law enforcement simply means that men who think that they can just take what they want, who believe that they can just impose their will on weaker people, will be freer to do so . . . and they will. Officers like Derek Chauvin need to be weeded out, and far more quickly than the Minneapolis Police Department did with him, but that does not mean that most police officers are bad ones or that our communities would somehow be safer with fewer cops.

Mrs Blecker and Mrs Burgess are perfectly free to give more and more of their money to whatever civic causes they like, and free to ask others to do the same. They are even free to ask the city government to impose higher taxes; that’s part of freedom of speech and of the press. But, as demonstrated above, their thinking is wholly misguided, and sensible people ought to reject it.
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Related Articles:

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Cross-posted on RedState.
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¹ – As of 11:59 PM on June 8th.
² – I noted yesterday how Kentucky’s lax parole system allowed Cody Alan Arnett to be released early, despite a history of violent crimes, and how he (allegedly) forcibly raped a Georgetown College coed after less than two months on the streets. Stricter sentencing and parole judgement would have saved that young woman from a horrible ordeal.

Hold them accountable!

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When last I wrote about Cody A Arnett, he had been accused of raping, at knifepoint, a Georgetown (Kentucky) College student, and was being held at the Scott County Detention Center.

Mr Arnett was arraigned on September 25, 2018. His bond was originally set at $50,000, but, according to WKYT News, when he asked for a 10% bail reduction, the judge read his past criminal record — he has five prior violent offense convictions — and doubled his bail to $100,000.

Well, that was 1½ years ago, and I kept looking to see how Mr Arnett’s case had been handled. I reached out to Leigh Searcy, a reporter for WLEX-TV, the NBC affiliate in Lexington. She responded, via Twitter, that Mt Arnett’s trial was set for March of this year, and due to COVID 19 all trials were canceled.¹ A new date hasn’t been set.

Some telephone and internet checking by me discovered that Mr Arnett is currently incarcerated at the Eastern Kentucky Correctional Complex near West Liberty, not for rape, but the two convictions for which he already had for robbery.

Mr Arnett was convicted for two robberies in Lexington, on August 7, 2015, and sentenced to five years in prison for each offense. As early as June 26, 2018 he was recommended for parole, and was scheduled to be released on August 1, 2018. This would mean that he served a week less than three years for his (supposedly) consecutive five year sentences. Why would the Division of Probation and Parole approve early release for a man with five prior violent offense convictions?

Cody Alan Arnett, from his offender record.

Well, whatever reasons they had have now been thrown in the trash, as Mr Arnett’s parole was revoked. According to the Kentucky Online Offender Lookup website, Mr Arnett is back in the clink for those robbery convictions, with a minimum expected expiration of his sentence, assuming good behavior, of January 4, 2024. His maximum sentence expiration date is August 1, 2030, but, sadly enough, he is eligible for a parole hearing on November 1th of this year!

Perhaps the parole board will have learned a lesson from all of this . . . and all that it took for them to learn this lesson was an innocent woman being forcibly raped.

Had Mr Arnett not been granted early parole, had he not been released in August of 2018, he would have still been in prison on that terrible day in late September. By approving the early release of a man with five prior violent felony convictions, the Division of Probation and Parole enabled Mr Arnett’s rape of his victim.

The members of parole board who decided to release Mr Arnett early should be held accountable for their responsibility in the rape of a young woman. Oh, they won’t be, because Kentucky state officials are legally protected from liability for their actions in performance of their duties as long as the actions were not, in themselves, illegal. But, in truth, the members who voted to release Mr Arnett ought to be sharing a cell with him.
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¹ – Though I contacted Miss Searcy for some information, she did not contribute to the writing of this article, and is in no way responsible for my statements or conclusions.

Democrisy: More idiotic pandering about #BlackLivesMatter

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Yet another Democratic mayor panders, but has presided over a huge murder rate among black citizens of her own city. From CNN:

Washington DC paints a giant ‘Black Lives Matter’ message on the road to the White House

By AJ Willingham, CNN | Updated 7:53 PM EDT, Fri June 05, 2020

(CNN) — Washington DC is painting a message in giant, yellow letters down a busy DC street ahead of a planned protest this weekend: BLACK LIVES MATTER.

The massive banner-like project spans two blocks of 16th Street, a central axis that leads southward straight to the White House. Each of the 16 bold, yellow letters spans the width of the two-lane street, creating an unmistakable visual easily spotted by aerial cameras and virtually anyone within a few blocks.

The painters were contacted by DC Mayor Muriel Bowser and began work early Friday morning, the mayor’s office told CNN. Bowser has officially deemed the section of 16th Street bearing the mural “Black Lives Matter Plaza,” complete with a new street sign.

There’s more at the original.

Mayor Bowser wanted to annoy, and somehow blame, President Trump, of course, but perhaps she should look to her own house. In 2019, there were 166 murders in the city the Mayor governs, a ten-year high. Of those 166 killings, 153 of the victims were black.

The population of the District of Columbia was estimated at 705,749 last year. Demographically, blacks made up 47.1% of the population, while whites were around 45.1%. That makes the murder rate for blacks 46.4 per 100,000 population, while for whites it’s just 4.1 per 100,000.

Put another way, while blacks make up slightly less than half of the population, they make up 92.2% of murder victims.

So, Mayor Bowser had a Black Lives Matter Plaza sign put up, every 2½ days in her city another black life is snuffed out by a murderer. Washington’s total murder rate is 23.5 per 100,000, almost as bad as Philadelphia’s 23.7, but the good Mayor hasn’t done squat about it, as the ten-year high number demonstrates.

Let’s tell the truth here: in Democratic-led cities across the nation, #BlackLivesMatter only when they are snuffed out by white men, particularly white police officers. But black lives don’t matter, not in the slightest, when they are ended by other black people in the poor areas of our major cities.

The liberal media cave to the demands of the ‘woke’

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Bari Weiss, from her Twitter biography.

Bari Weiss is, from her Twitter biography, a Staff editor and writer @nytopinion. Formerly of @WSJ and @tabletmag. She is the author of How to Fight AntiSemitism, which is a 2019 National Jewish Book Award and a Natan Notable Book Award.

Well, Miss Weiss really stepped in it yesterday by doing something truly radical: in a long thread on Twitter, she told the truth.

That is the lead tweet. Rather than embed each tweet, I have copied and pasted them into a single quotation:

The civil war inside The New York Times between the (mostly young) wokes the (mostly 40+) liberals is the same one raging inside other publications and companies across the country. The dynamic is always the same. (Thread.)

The Old Guard lives by a set of principles we can broadly call civil libertarianism. They assumed they shared that worldview with the young people they hired who called themselves liberals and progressives. But it was an incorrect assumption.

The New Guard has a different worldview, one articulated best by @JonHaidt and
@glukianoff. They call it “safetyism,” in which the right of people to feel emotionally and psychologically safe trumps what were previously considered core liberal values, like free speech.

Perhaps the cleanest example of this dynamic was in 2018, when David Remnick, under tremendous public pressure from his staffers, disinvited Steve Bannon from appearing on stage at the New Yorker Ideas Festival. But there are dozens and dozens of examples.

I’ve been mocked by many people over the past few years for writing about the campus culture wars. They told me it was a sideshow. But this was always why it mattered: The people who graduated from those campuses would rise to power inside key institutions and transform them.

I’m in no way surprised by what has now exploded into public view. In a way, it’s oddly comforting: I feel less alone and less crazy trying to explain the dynamic to people. What I am shocked by is the speed. I thought it would take a few years, not a few weeks.

Here’s one way to think about what’s at stake: The New York Times motto is “all the news that’s fit to print.” One group emphasizes the word “all.” The other, the word “fit.”

W/r/t (With regard to) Tom Cotton’s oped and the choice to run it: I agree with our critics that it’s a dodge to say “we want a totally open marketplace of ideas!” There are limits. Obviously. The question is: does his view fall outside those limits? Maybe the answer is yes.

If the answer is yes, it means that the view of more than half of Americans are unacceptable. And perhaps they are. “A plurality of Democrats would support calling in the U.S. military to aid police during protests, poll shows“

Other than clarifying the abbreviation W/r/t, I have made no editorial changes to her tweets.

Miss Weiss received a lot of blowback for telling the truth. The Washington Post’s (purportedly) conservative columnist and virulently #NeverTrump Jennifer Rubin responded:

I assume that by “AA employee” Mrs Rubin means ‘African American employees.’ Twitter’s 280 character-and-space limits often lead to people using unclear abbreviations and shortcuts.

And a couple of others:

The NYT literally published an “opinion” article about why the military should be used to murder those standing up for Black lives. Horrifying and dangerous — Chronically Online.

Arguing that NY Times should publish a white male senator endorsing military force across the nation against it’s citizens as they misuse that power on PEACEFUL protestors is saying All Opinions Matter. NY Times is on par with Facebook News Feed? — evanwiener

Miss Weiss is certainly no conservative, though I would guess that being a Jew who supports Israel, many of the woke¹ see her as an unrepentant and unapologetic fascist.

The editors of The New York Times quickly surrendered to the woke in its newsroom:

New York Times Says Senator’s Op-Ed Did Not Meet Standards

After a staff uproar, The Times says the editing process was “rushed.” Senator Tom Cotton’s “Send In the Troops” essay is now under review.

By Marc Tracy, Rachel Abrams and Edmund Lee | June 4, 2020

Executives at The New York Times scrambled on Thursday to address the concerns of employees and readers who were angered by the newspaper’s publication of an opinion essay by a United States senator calling for the federal government to send the military to suppress protests against police violence in American cities.

James Bennet, the editor in charge of the opinion section, said in a meeting with staff members late in the day that he had not read the essay before it was published. Shortly afterward, The Times issued a statement saying the essay fell short of the newspaper’s standards.

And here comes the money line:

“We’ve examined the piece and the process leading up to its publication,” Eileen Murphy, a Times spokeswoman, said in a statement. “This review made clear that a rushed editorial process led to the publication of an Op-Ed that did not meet our standards. As a result, we’re planning to examine both short-term and long-term changes, to include expanding our fact-checking operation and reducing the number of Op-Eds we publish.”

There you have it: Not only are the editors going to ‘expand’ their fact-checking of other people’s opinions, but they are going to reduce the number of outside opinion pieces they publish.

It was a matter of safety, don’t you know!

Dozens of Times employees objected to the Op-Ed on social media, despite a company policy that instructs them not to post partisan comments or take sides on issues. Many of them responded on Twitter with the sentence, “Running this puts Black @NYTimes staff in danger.” More than 160 employees planned a virtual walkout for Friday morning, according to two organizers of the protest.

How, exactly, does publishing an OpEd piece ‘put black Times staff in danger’? Apparently not only sticks and stones can break their bones, but words will severely hurt them.

On June 2nd, The Philadelphia Inquirer ran an article “Buildings Matter, Too.” And then they caved, too, tweeting:

A headline published in Tuesday’s Inquirer was offensive, inappropriate and we should not have printed it. We deeply regret that we did. We also know that an apology on its own is not sufficient.

We need to do better. We’ve heard that loud and clear, including from our own staff. We will. A detailed explanation of how we got this so wrong will follow later today.

The upper-middle class left think that they can appease the radicals and be their allies, but if the revolution ever comes, they’ll be among the first ones lined up against the wall.

But of course buildings matter: civilization began when, among other things, humans started building shelters. People live in buildings, and people work in buildings. As the mob burn out or smash businesses — usually small businesses — perhaps they are striking a blow against the evil capitalist exploiters, but they are concomitantly putting the evil capitalist exploiters’ employees out of work. Eventually those out-of-work employees are going to have to pay the rent and buy food.

One point needs to be stressed here. In Miss Weiss’ first tweet of the thread, she wrote:

The civil war inside The New York Times between the (mostly young) wokes the (mostly 40+) liberals is the same one raging inside other publications and companies across the country.

If the internal ‘war’ is between the wokes and the older liberals, one has to ask: where do the conservatives at The New York Times fall on this? And the obvious answer is that: they don’t fall anywhere, because there are no conservatives at the Times. The Times hired young reporter Ali Watkins, who slept with at least one of her sources, even though she claimed to have informed the editors of this, and all they did was reassign her to a different beat.

But an actual conservative? Heaven forfend! because the woke would doubtlessly complain that his mere presence was a threat and an attack on their well-being . . . and management would cave in to their demands.

Newspapers are failing across this country, and even the biggest ones, such as the Times and The Washington Post have felt the pinch. The Los Angeles Times, the fifth largest daily circulation newspaper in the country, has been through a bankruptcy. Banking on being ‘woke’ isn’t going to help these newspapers, because the millennials never really got their news from newspapers.

And, of course, Miss Weiss didn’t limit her tweets to just The New York Times: she said that the struggle “is the same one raging inside other publications and companies across the country.” The credentialed media are thoroughly dominated by the left, with only a couple of exceptions in Fox News Channel and One America News Network.

Well, the Times and the Inquirer can surrender to the ‘woke’ left, deciding, as Miss Weiss put it, to concentrate on what they see as ‘fit’ to print, but all that can do is further divide the country. The ‘woke’ didn’t want liberals to even have the opportunity to choose to read or not read Senator Cotton’s OpEd piece, just another attempt at deplatforming speakers and views which they don’t like. Considering that the Times had argued vociferously against prior restraint in the Pentagon Papers case, New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971), the new policy of “reducing the number of Op-Eds (they) publish” pretty much pegs the Irony Meter.

The left were shocked, astounded, dumbfounded, and appalled when Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016. It was impossible, we were told, because Mr Trump had no path to 270 electoral votes — even by conservatives, though conservative New Yorkers to be sure — because the urban-based media just couldn’t see and didn’t understand much of America. Hillary Clinton herself was astounded that she wasn’t fifty points ahead.

So, the woke can continue to wrap themselves ever more tightly in their insular cocoon, jamming their fingers tightly into their ears and shouting to drown out other voices, but what they are doing is uneducating themselves, and that can only lead to more surprises like 2016.
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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.