GOODER AND HARDER, PHILADELPHIA: This Philly Gas Station Owner Has Had Enough of His City’s Criminals.

A gas station owner in the crime-plagued city of Philadelphia is sending a stern warning to any would-be robbers and carjackers: You’re at risk of being shot by the heavily armed security guards.

Fox29 and NBC10 Philadelphia are reporting that Neil Patel, owner of KARCO in North Philadelphia, has hired several security guards armed with firearms to protect customers while they get gas or shop inside the store. Oftentimes, carjackers and muggers like to target customers while their vehicle is stopped.

A North Philly owner says he’s had enough violent crime at his gas station so he’s hired these guys to protect his customers and store.

Does this make you feel safer? Or uncomfortable. pic.twitter.com/ZOXvUxTvyW

— Jason Martinez (@JasonFox29) December 6, 2022

In answer to the Fox 29 reporter’s query, his clip makes me feel like I’ve seen something similar before:

As Philadelphia continues to morph into Detroit, it’s a reminder that the city’s last Republican mayor left office in 1952.

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED:

Shot: Should You Learn To Code? Find out if there’s been an article written telling you specifically to code or not.

—BuzzFeed News, February 10th, 2014.

Chaser:  BuzzFeed to cut 12% of staff, citing possible downturn that could extend ‘well into 2023.’

—MarketWatch, today.

SOMEBODY SET UP US THE BOMB: Raphael Warnock: I Support Abortion Because “It’s Exactly What Jesus Would Do.”

JUST NBC THE MEMORY HOLE! Pin your yarmulkes back and listen to Al Sharpton bemoan Kanye West’s antisemitism on MSNBC:

As far as we know, Al Sharpton has never expressed anything resembling genuine regret or contrition for his own antisemitism. And yet here he is, talking about Kanye West’s antisemitism. West’s antisemitism is indeed “wrong no matter what” … so why isn’t Sharpton’s?

Related: O Ye of Little Faith: The Anti-Semitism of Kanye West.

Now, as then, anti-Semitism has a function: It translates traditional and retrograde attitudes into a political interpretation with potential for radical social action.

So it was in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, where local preachers laid the groundwork and served as apologists for the deadly 1991 riots. For three days, black rioters proclaiming themselves the second coming of Hitler beat up any Jew they could find. In this magazine in November 1979, Dorothy Rabinowitz foresaw the violence, noting that in Crown Heights, “public expression of anti-Semitic sentiment, as a means of conveying political antagonism, seems now to have become normal.” When I spoke to one of the rabble-rousing black reverends in 2021, he still justified his actions with all kinds of grievances, comparing Chabad to the Ku Klux Klan and substantiating his claims with minutiae about political maneuvering and access to government funding. Decades from now, I expect to hear similar figures use the New York Times’ latest distortion—that Hasidic schools steal funds from poor black children—as a justification for some future attack.

Even after a Jew had been murdered in Crown Heights, with dozens beaten and thousands forced into hiding, “civil-rights leaders” such as Al Sharpton continued to fan the flames and suggest that the Lubavitchers had deserved the pogrom they got. Only days before the riot, Sharpton had said, “If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house.” He said it in defense of Leonard Jeffries, then the chairman of black studies at City College, who was under fire for blaming Jews for the slave trade, among other wild theories. The black New York radio station WLIB and the Amsterdam News and City Sun papers also rallied to Jeffries’s defense. Not one black lawmaker in Albany signed the condemnation of Jeffries.

In reporting on the 30th anniversary of the Crown Heights riots last year for the Wall Street Journal, I spoke to Brooklyn’s Laurie Cumbo, then majority leader of the New York City Council. Cumbo called the riots “the Crown Heights Uprising,” because “‘riots’ give the impression of [having] no basis.”

So I hope you’ll forgive my cynicism about the response to Kanye West. If West hadn’t first raised the ire of black leaders with his friendly treatment of Donald Trump, we would hear now that he’s speaking from a place of pain. We’d hear that anti-Semitism “is for some black folks a defense against antiblack racism on the part of Jews,” as bell hooks, the pioneering black feminist scholar, wrote in 1992. Adapting James Baldwin, apologists would explain that when West said “Jew,” he really meant “white.” But, as Earl Raab pointed out in COMMENTARY in January 1969, “that is an exact and acute description of political anti-Semitism. ‘The enemy’ becomes the Jew, ‘the man’ becomes the Jew,… who stands symbolically for generic evil.”

Exit quote: “Anti-Semitism from above, in speeches and tracts, has always proceeded in a dialectic with anti-Semitism from below, with rocks and bricks. Kanye West is nuts, and so is the guy who sucker punches a Hasid in Brooklyn. They hear the same noise—and each other.”

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Horrified Balenciaga Teddy Bear Can’t Remember Safe Word.

MILES MONROE, CALL YOUR OFFICE! The great Covid and cigarettes cover-up:

Since back then Big Tech’s fact-checkers were still describing claims about SARS-CoV-2 being airborne and face masks preventing infection as ‘misleading’, a fake-news flag was something of a badge of honour. And, as with those claims, the ‘disputed’ information in my article has been borne out by the evidence.

After a brief burst of incredulous coverage in the spring of 2020, the media soon lost interest in the hypothesis that smokers are less likely to get Covid-19, but dozens of studies have been quietly published in the past two-and-a-half years which confirm it. I have been listing them on my blog and last week added the hundredth study. It seems a good time to stop. By any reasonable standard, the jury is in.

RIP: Kirstie Alley Dead: Star of ‘Cheers’ Dies at 71 After Short Battle with Cancer.

21st CENTURY HEADLINES: I’m gay, I support gay marriage, and I don’t think the ‘gay rights’ side should win in this Supreme Court case.

On Monday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case called 303 Creative LLC v Elenis. The case centers around Lorie Smith, a Christian who owns a website design business. She wants to expand her business and start designing custom wedding websites, but due to her religious beliefs, is unwilling to create them for same-sex weddings, as she would be forced to do under current Colorado civil rights law. Smith is challenging the Colorado statute on First Amendment grounds, arguing that she has a free speech right (note: the case is not about religious liberty) not to be forced to create messages she disagrees with.

No, she’s not suing because she wants to put a “no-gays allowed” sign in her window. In fact, she has served many LGBTQ clients and offers her general services to all. Smith is simply unwilling to create a custom wedding website, which inherently endorses said wedding, for a ceremony she does not agree with. She says she would seek to make the same refusal to other custom websites that violate her beliefs, including those which denigrate gay people or feature a heterosexual couple in violation of other tenets of her Christian faith.

The state of Colorado, on the other hand, argues that her religion does not grant her an exemption to a neutral civil rights law. The government argues that if Smith is going to offer wedding websites, she must offer them to all.

Related: Justice Gorsuch Leaves CO Solicitor General Stammering During Oral Arguments on Religious Liberty.

For understandable reasons, Gorsuch wasn’t really interested in hearing such obvious nonsense, noting that Jack Phillips had been put through a re-education program for honoring his religious convictions. That left the solicitor general stammering in an attempt to explain how it wasn’t a re-education program even though its purpose was to re-educate.

Listening to that, Gorsuch is pretty obviously going to side with the web designer, and that’s the proper decision given that the basic tenets of religious liberty are at stake here. It’s not hard to judge where Barrett is going to end up either, and Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas are slam dunks if history is any guide. That really just leaves Justice Kavanaugh as the swing vote because Justice Roberts will do what he always does, which is be a coward who attempts to carve out some unworkable middle ground.

When the Jack Phillips case was decided four years ago, the court chickened out, essentially giving him the win on a technicality that didn’t address the root issue. Unfortunately, the harassment of Phillips and others continues to this day. Hopefully, the Supreme Court is ready to put an end to the insanity with a decisive ruling.

Colorado’s population is 5.81 million. Given that the state apparently has only one cake maker and Website developer, this is seems like a remarkable opportunity for the entrepreneurial-inclined individual.

OKAY, GROOMERS: Indiana School Compels Counselors, Teachers to Hide ‘Gender Support Plans’ From Parents.

ELON MUSK AND MATT TAIBBI HAVE THE PERFECT RESPONSE TO LIBERAL MEDIA’S FURY WITH THE TRUTH. Taibbi “said he was ‘looking forward’ to going through all the ‘PR for the richest man on earth’ tweets, ‘and seeing how many of them have run stories for anonymous sources at the FBI, CIA, the Pentagon, and White House.’”

CREEPY PORN LAWYER UPDATE: Disgraced lawyer Michael Avenatti, onetime opponent of Donald Trump, sentenced to 14 years in fraud case.

Disgraced lawyer Michael Avenatti was sentenced on Monday to 14 years in federal prison for defrauding his clients and for obstructing IRS efforts to collect payroll taxes from his coffee business.

He was also ordered to pay $7 million in restitution.

The sentence will run consecutively with his combined five-year sentence in New York for stealing from Stormy Daniels and for extorting Nike.

The punishment, imposed by a federal judge in Los Angeles, is a few years shy of what prosecutors sought.

Avenatti pleaded guilty in June to stealing money from clients, including one who is a paraplegic, and one count of obstructing collection of federal payroll taxes from his coffee business.

Avenatti skyrocketed to celebrity status in 2018 alongside Daniels, his then-client and an adult film star, who filed multiple lawsuits — unsuccessfully — against then-President Donald Trump.

For a time, the brash lawyer was a fixture on cable news shows and the topic of flattering magazine pieces.

The above ABC News article omits what was said about Avenatti on an ABC News-produced show: Flashback: Ana Navarro Compares Michael Avenatti To The Holy Spirit On Live TV.

Another flashback: A Look Back At All The Media Praise For Michael Avenatti.

DAVID THOMPSON: An Inexplicable Dislike.

At Carleton University’s School of Journalism and Communication, a panel of journalists and media professionals declare their priorities.

The full two-and-a-half-hour video, which begins with a land acknowledgement and rumblings about “settlers” and their “racial guilt,” and “white supremacist colonial mindsets which we have internalised both collectively and individually,” can be endured here.

Following this lengthy declaration of innate racial wrongness, the panellists begin to ruminate on “how best to confront the corrosive force of online hate targeted at journalists.” Being a journalist on Twitter, where the public can talk back, sometimes bluntly, is equated with surviving in an active warzone and other “hostile physical environments,” with women, the majority of the panel, apparently hardest hit. Journalists, we’re told, are “exposed to danger in the digital world” and consequently suffer high rates of “anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic distress.” As a result of being mocked or disagreed with on Twitter. “We don’t want our journalists to be killed,” says Catherine Tait, the president and CEO of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

And then there are the brave warriors inside Twitter: Ex-Twitter Executive: Elon Musk Is Putting Us ‘In Harm’s Way’ By Showing How We Censored Content.

Taibbi tweeted out screenshots showing that company officials were in regular contact with Democrats and censored content that Democrats wanted removed.

“Publicly posting the names and identities of front-line employees involved in content moderation puts them in harm’s way and is a fundamentally unacceptable thing to do,” Roth posted on Mastodon.

On the frontline! Whole lot of leftists really leaning hard into the century-old “moral equivalent of war” concept.

BOMB CANADA: THE CASE FOR WAR. Canucks Claim Killing Cripples Is Compassionate Care.

If you’re an MSNBC viewer and you don’t know what “euthanize” means: This lady was having trouble getting around the house, so Canada offered to move her into a coffin.

Wow, even Canada’s own government admits that living in the second-worst snowbound communist country on Earth is a fate worse than death.

This sort of medical advice is not only legal in Canada, it’s actually preferred under the country’s Medical Assistance In Dying law, or MAID. Hey, maybe socialized medicine is the way to go after all. I can’t even get my maid to do the windows, let alone a contract killing.

I’m pretty sure Charlton Heston didn’t agree to star in Soylent Green because he thought it would make a great how-to guide for 2022:

(Classical reference in headline.)

RIP: Bob McGrath, Sesame Street veteran, dies at 90: ‘Brought joy and wonder to generations of children.’

HOUSE DEMOCRAT WHIP KATHERINE CLARK SAYS CHILD WAKES UP WITH NIGHTMARES OVER ‘CLIMATE CHANGE.’

Here’s proof Clark uttered these words on broadcast television, to no pushback:

Incoming House Democrat Whip Katherine Clark: "I remember my middle child waking waking up with nightmares over concern around climate change." pic.twitter.com/Xayp52a20K

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) December 4, 2022

One of two scenarios is possible:

1) Katherine Clark is lying about her child’s experiences to stoke hysteria around climate change for political gain.

2) She aggressively instilled unjust fear into her child, causing them to lose sleep over a political talking point.

We hope it’s the former for the sake of the child. Sincerely.

Indeed, but door number two is a distinct possibility: Progressives Against Progress. The rise of environmentalism poisoned liberals’ historical optimism. “Crankery, in short, became respectable. In 1972, Sir John Maddox, editor of the British journal Nature, noted that though it had once been usual to see maniacs wearing sandwich boards that proclaimed the imminent end of the Earth, they had been replaced by a growing number of frenzied activists and politicized scientists making precisely the same claim. In the years since then, liberalism has seen recurring waves of such end-of-days hysteria. These waves have shared not only a common pattern but often the same cast of characters. Strangely, the promised despoliations are most likely to be presented as imminent when Republicans are in the White House. In each case, liberals have argued that the threat of catastrophe can be averted only through drastic actions in which the ordinary political mechanisms of democracy are suspended and power is turned over to a body of experts and supermen.”

JIM GERAGHTY: Elon Musk and Matt Taibbi: ‘Twitter Files’ Paint an Ugly Portrait.

The revelations of the “Twitter Files” paint an ugly portrait of the individuals who made decisions about standards of content on Twitter during the 2020 presidential campaign. The company’s senior management — oddly, without consulting or involving CEO Jack Dorsey — basically decided unilaterally that people shouldn’t be allowed to read the New York Post’s article, which laid out emails indicating that Hunter Biden introduced his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm, “less than a year before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine to fire a prosecutor who was investigating the company.”

Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, gave reporter Matt Taibbi access to internal company emails and records, and Taibbi laid out in a series of tweets how the company “took extraordinary steps to suppress the story, removing links and posting warnings that it may be ‘unsafe.’ They even blocked its transmission via direct message, a tool hitherto reserved for extreme cases, e.g. child pornography.”

The reasoning behind the ban of the article was the contention that it included “hacked materials,” even though there was no evidence of hacking. The Post said the information was obtained from a computer that was dropped off at a repair shop in Biden’s home state of Delaware in April 2019 and never reclaimed. This was not electronic theft; this was old-fashioned reporting — and exceptionally bad judgment on Hunter Biden’s part, which at this point shouldn’t seem implausible to anyone.

Note that Twitter made its decision to restrict access to and distribution of the Post story before more than 50 former senior intelligence officials signed a letter contending that the trove of emails from Hunter Biden “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” (In retrospect, the characterization of it as an “information operation” instead of a “disinformation operation” was a revealing admission.)

Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey must have known what was coming when he tweeted in April:

DISPATCHES FROM THE NO FUN LEAGUE: Hypocritical NFL Fines Cowboys Players For Salvation Army Celebration.

RATS ON THE WEST SIDE, BEDBUGS UPTOWN: Wanted: NYC Rat Czar. Will Offer Salary as High as $170,000.

JEFF DUNETZ: Putin-One Foot In The Grave, The Other On A Banana Peel?

NEW VICE CITY:

In August, New York mayor Eric Adams stood before a banner festooned with cannabis-leaf emblems, making what he billed as a major announcement. “Today, we light up our economy,” enthused the mayor. Referring to recreational pot sales, he continued: “The regulated adult-use cannabis industry is a once-in-a-generation opportunity. . . . Cannabis NYC will plant the seeds for the economy of tomorrow.” Standing with Adams, John Durso of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union promised “good, union jobs.” Jeffrey Garcia of the Latino Cannabis Association predicted “one of the largest generators of wealth in New York at least for the next two decades.” Bertha Lewis of the Black Institute affirmed that “cannabis is an industry and not just a nickel bag.” Deputy mayor for economic development Maria Torres-Springer promised “hundreds of millions in revenue” for the city.

Welcome to New York’s post-pandemic economic-development policy: the promotion of vice. In this New York, vice isn’t something to tolerate, operating on the edges of the law, in a black market in a dense, wealthy city; it’s a premier growth industry.

And pot isn’t the only vice that New York is encouraging. Gotham is also eagerly courting multiple full-service casinos. It’s a path that struggling and far weaker American cities—including Atlantic City, New Orleans, and Detroit—took out of sheer economic desperation, born of policy failure. Adams is unabashedly cheering the expansion of “gaming,” as he calls it, to “create at least 16,000 good-paying jobs.”

New York’s new emphasis on pot and poker—even as the city ignores the day-to-day quality-of-life concerns of its core high-paying industries in finance and business and its highest-earning individual taxpayers—comes despite decades’ worth of evidence that vice-oriented cities don’t thrive.

A topic City Journal’s Nicole Gelinas explores in depth; referencing the not exactly thriving gambling havens of Atlantic City, Detroit, and New Orleans.

CRYPTO STOCKS TEETER NEAR ABYSS AS FINK’S WARNING ADDS TO ANGST:

Already reeling from the so-called crypto winter, investors were dealt a major blow with the high-profile collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX exchange in early November, which sent Bitcoin tumbling. To top it off, BlackRock Chief Executive Larry Fink said this week that he expects most crypto companies will fold after FTX’s demise. A Schwab index tracking crypto-linked stocks is coming off its worst month since June, and is down 63% this year.

“Questions about whether crypto has a future have become prevalent after a year during which many tokens lost more than 70% of their value and the collapse of FTX has exacerbated a crisis of confidence that had started in the spring,” said Mark Palmer, an analyst at BTIG LLC.

Few, if any, companies connected to the sector have been spared during the selloff, with even banks like Silvergate Capital Corp. and Signature Bank taking hits. Mining stocks have been among the worst performers, with Marathon Digital Holdings Inc. and Hut 8 Mining Corp. both seeing their share prices cut roughly in half in November.

FTX’s sudden downfall sparked fears of contagion across the industry, which ultimately became a reality this week when crypto lender BlockFi Inc. also filed for bankruptcy.

“We expect the crypto space to continue to be toxic for investors in the near-term and expect overall chain activity to be relatively quiet among users as we continue to wait out potential contagion effects as a result of the bankruptcy of FTX,” Chase White, an analyst at Compass Point, wrote in a note to clients.

Flashback from the Onion: Man Who Lost Everything In Crypto Just Wishes Several Thousand More People Had Warned Him.

RACISM TO BLAME FOR FIRING OF LIBERAL MSNBC HOST TIFFANY CROSS, CLAIMS WASHINGTON POST COLUMNIST:

Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah blamed racism for MSNBC’s abrupt firing of Black weekend anchor Tiffany Cross earlier last month.

In a Friday column, Attiah argued that Cross’s ouster was a “a reminder that the rug could be pulled out from under [Black journalists] at any time.”

She added that it was a “bad look” in a time when “attacks against Black educators, authors and journalists are increasing across the country.”

Fair enough. Why is NBC such a cesspit of racism?!

POLITICO DROPPED OBSESSION WITH PAUL PELOSI ATTACK AFTER ELECTION WAS OVER:

After a total of ELEVEN Paul Pelosi assault  stories appearing in the October 29 edition of Politico in which the alleged assailant, David DePape, was portrayed (with scant evidence) as a MAGA Republican for whom GOP officials were expected to apologize for, the sum total of these stories once the midterm elections were safely past dwindled to the extent that for the past couple of weeks, there has been no follow-up on the investigation of how this attack unfolded.

What makes it more curious is that after their October 31 attack upon conservatives for questioning the official account of the assault, there has been complete silence from Politico on the retraction of an NBC story and suspension of the reporter, Miguel Almaguer, for revealing that Paul Pelosi answered the door on the night the police arrived.

* * * * * * * *

Exit question: Will anyone in the press pull back Paul Pelosi from his current nonperson status and investigate why the post-election suppression of the assault story after having hyped it so heavily before the election?

No. It was a modified limited hangout for the DNC-MSM prior to the midterms, and served its purpose. Old news — let’s move on to what is important now.

MARY KATHARINE HAM: Why the Media Makes Musk a Villain but Lets SBF Off Easy.

“YEEZY COME, YEEZY GO:” Regret your Kanye West tattoo? This studio will remove it for free.

Do you have a Kanye West tattoo you now regret? A tattoo-removal studio in Britain is removing body art inspired by the rapper – and it won’t even charge you for it.

“We’ll remove your Kanye tattoos for free,” London-based Naama Studios announced on Instagram last month as Ye, the rapper and music mogul formerly known as Kanye West, was condemned over a string of antisemitic statements made publicly in recent months.

In a play on the rapper’s name, the tattoo parlor even came up with a slogan for its service: “Yeezy come, Yeezy go.”

In one tweet, which has since been deleted, Ye said he would go “death con 3” on “JEWISH PEOPLE,” an apparent reference to Defcon, the U.S. military defense readiness system. He also propounded false claims about George Floyd’s killing at the hands of Minneapolis police.

“We understand that tattoos can be triggering for some people and not everyone can afford to remove their tattoos,” the company told The Washington Post in an email Thursday. It noted that one of the people who took them up on the offer said she was being trolled for her Ye-inspired tattoo.

The store said several people have contacted it in recent weeks to have their Ye tattoos lasered off – a procedure that can cost up to 2,000 pounds (about $2,400).

“When you have a tattoo inspired by someone you admire and they start making headlines for all the wrong reasons, it’s not exactly something you want to wear on your sleeve,” Naama said.

But why would you do that in the first place? As Theodore Dalrymple once warned, the tattoo parlor is “the refutation of the doctrine that the customer is always the right. In the tattoo parlour, the customer is always wrong.”

Similarly, Ayn Rand didn’t write The Return of the Primitive as a how-to guide.