Over Salted Pretzel

Is "crime down" in Philadelphia? In 2024, the topline metric, homicide, totaled less than 300 for the first time in 8 years. But what about other crimes? And how does crime compare now to when the city last had relatively low homicides 2013-2016? Well, crime is still very high. 2024 had ~16,000 more Part 1 (aka Index) crimes, deemed the most serious by the FBI, than 2013 and over 20,000 more than 2016. There is also some question as to how similarly categorized crimes are coded and subsequently updated in the datasets, which I will get into later with an example on assaults

@jenNY_PHL If that was the only problem, then it just becomes a budgetary issue. If you don't live in a good catchment, your kids dont get into a good charter / magnet, or you just dont like the curriculum, you can pay for a solution. But it's WAY more than school

@OverSaltPretzel And the schools…

Good thread, and something we talk about often. We basically have a suspense date (year) when our family will look to the suburbs so we can let our then 7-8 year old go out and be a kid. I live in one of the nicer neighborhoods in the city. But the problems with Philly, and cities more broadly, is that QoL issues - deranged homeless addicts (especially on transit), off leash dogs (pitbulls), bands of dirtbikes, etc - are either off limits or very very low on the list of enforcement. And I shouldn't forget the complete lack of enforcement against juvenile criminals, even violent ones, adding another edge of real danger to kids growing up here. Overtly antisocial behavior makes what should be an awesome place to grow up, with access to so much, almost completely untenable.

@StrayGarfield People commit crimes because they want to, especially for something as publicly antisocial as the dirtbike gangs. Theres a clip of one of the City Council members saying something like "bike life is our culture, and I love their enthusiasm". Pure trash IDpol and social relativism

I remember this. I had a lot of liberal/progressive friends until 2020, many of whom were honestly good-hearted but pretty naive, impressionable people. It's like they believe everyone is benevolent and those who commit crimes just don't have the right environment to make better decisions in life. It just doesn't seem to occur to them that even with the 'right environment,' some people will still do terrible things because that's their choice. They won't hold them accountable, though, because to them, it's the environment and not the personal decision.

Remember when Jamie Gauthier and other lunatic progressives in Philly had the same exact idea? The transgressive aspect of riding your dirt bike down the street with a gang is the whole point! That's why they do it. As Tom Sizemore famously said, "The action IS the Juice"

@ArtemisConsort @cremieuxrecueil Breastfeeding is a notorious example.

How to manufacture a non-causal association: 1. Have authoritative person say “[thing] is good/bad” 2. Wait for smart, conscientious people to do more/less of [thing] in response 3. Boom! [thing] now correlates with every good outcome. Pick one that sounds plausible

Decades of lavishly funded public education created most of our most severe problems.

Trump is right. If American conservative young men weren't poisoned by a Leftist psyop against Israel, they'd think it's one of the coolest, most badass places on Earth. But, they've got yet another mind virus.

What's critical to note in the ATF thread is the age of the offenders. If they had been prosecuted by the @philadao, and not have their cases withdrawn, they would have fallen under Krasner's disastrous young adult deprosecution initiative that reduced sentences for 18-25 year old, who are the meat of the criminal population

If you think recent drops in crime in Philadelphia are anything other than enforcement related, you're not paying attention to the multiple layers of increased arrests, convictions and, most importantly, incarceration. The feds have stepped in at each level to fill gaps and put pressure on criminals in the city. Federal time is no joke

Today, Tax Day, we honor those Americans who work for a living so that others don't have to

@MostlyMonkey The overwhelming power of the USN, really just one carrier group, is so taken for granted after decades of having zero near-peers that it's lost on almost everyone. Still surprises me though

I urge them to try, you fucking idiot.

Glad they didnt squish on these demands, especially after the unrelenting punishment the US and Israel have dealt out. The Hormuz issue can be solved partially in the near term with military assets and almost completely in the midterm with infrastructure development across the Gulf. No Gulf nation will take this risk again. Eliminating Iran's nuclear abilities is worth the short term $1 per gallon or whatever

A U.S. official details the U.S. "red lines" in the talks with Iran: ☢️Ending all uranium enrichment ☢️Dismantle all major nuclear enrichment facilities (which are mostly destroyed) ☢️Retrieve highly enriched uranium 📄Accept a broader peace, security and de-escalation framework that includes regional allies 💰End funding for terrorist proxies Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis 🚢Fully open the Strait of Hormuz, charging no tolls for passage 💰One gap in the talks was the amount of Iranian frozen funds that will be released, per source with knowledge

Some Americans are so filled with hatred for Trump and their own country that they actually desperately want to believe Iran has won. They'll side with anyone that's a US adversary. I dread what this means for further confrontation between the US and China. As of right now, the US has achieved a stunning victory in Iran. While the Iranian regime was forced to use children as meat shields, the US was able to.. -reopen the Strait of Hormuz -destroy Iran's medium range medium-range missiles -end Iran's chances of getting a nuke -show the US military is so powerful, it can construct an ad hoc base deep within a country the US is actively at war with to retrieve downed personnel -murder basically the entire Iranian leadership This isn't about praising or condemning Trump. It's about being so demoralized you actually want your own country to lose, because you've lived such a privileged life you can't even imagine what it would be like if the US is defeated.

When Trump doesn't nuke Iran tonight, all the people screaming he's about to commit genocide will seamlessly shift to posting "Taco Tuesday" memes and claiming he chickened out. It's all a game to these people.

By locking up <2% of the population, El Salvador took itself from being the murder capital of the world to being safer than Canada. With sufficient effort, anywhere can become peaceful and crime-free. And it's on track to get even more peaceful this year!

He's our neeiighbooor

Parents who abandoned their child in the street are now heroes to the liberal media because Trump said abandoning your kid is wrong. Can't make it up. Amazingly, in this video, Liam's mother admits she didn't open the door to her own child and admits they are economic migrants, not asylum seekers. Another liberal media hoax bites the dust.

I cannot overstate how significant the rescue of the second crew member from the downed F-15E is. The op denied Tehran a major propaganda victory, stripping it of leverage it could have used to shape negotiations to end to the war on its terms. Bravo to the rescuers involved.

NYT article is fake, and motivated, in two glaring ways: (1) As @UnderSecretaryF notes below, @StateDept never “dismissed” foreign propaganda threats. In @SecRubio confirmation testimony and my own, we framed these as serious challenges — but rightly excluded censorship of Americans as a response to them. Congress agreed, and declined to renew funding for GEC — even before our admin took office. An entire industry of “disinformation” experts strain to frame censorship opposition as sinister or naive. (They are eager to give quotes to journalists.) Once you’ve seen the intel and grasp the threat, they claim, you’ll understand why it’s vital to spend tax dollars suppressing content from outlets like @FDRLST and @unherd. If you disagree, they say, then perhaps you’re a foreign asset. Of course, that’s wrong. I have seen the intel and grasp the threat. Actors including Russia, China, and Iran — aided by unpaid volunteers who delight in spreading foreign regime propaganda for anti-American ideological reasons — do want to seed your timeline with slop. Effects of this are most acute in smaller, overseas info environments, where competing news sources can be sparse. This can harm American interests, and warrants an American response. We advocate a spectrum of them. But we exclude censorship — much to the chagrin of people who want to revive COVID-era absurdities and entrench them as the future of the internet. (2) Nobody instructed diplomats to prioritize tweeting (“push back on X”) as a response to propaganda. We did send a cable emphasizing counterspeech generally, which can be undertaken on any/all appropriate platform(s). And just as I’ve done publicly, our diplomatic cable highlights @CommunityNotes as an example of a constructive technology in the info space. This was a helpful counterexample to some of the censorious tech that governments previously promoted (eg, ad-blacklist tools). No single tool is a panacea, but crowd-sourced annotations show some promise, particularly when there are algo safeguards against dominance by “brigades” of coordinated users or ideological blocs. Finally, some reporters seem to find it notable that we mention coordination with DoW MISO ops (“psyops”). This is a longstanding practice, for obvious reasons: if State and DoW are messaging on overlapping issues in overlapping regions, one hand needs to know what the other is doing.