What Kind Of Crimes Capture "Our" Attention?

darrellowens  |  I don’t really know if there’s a crime wave regardless of the perception that there is one. I don’t trust police statistics besides homicide, home invasion and auto burglaries. I don’t know many people who would make a police report about assault or theft. I worked at a Walgreens with an extensive theft problem and know first hand only extreme cases were reported to the police. In San Francisco, there’s seven fewer homicides, two hundred more burglaries and fifty more motor thefts than last year. Is that a crime wave? I suppose. The entire country has seen increased crime since the pandemic. The only thing that sticks out about San Francisco is the appalling high drug overdoses last year in which no other Bay Area county came close.

Couldn’t help but notice that the vast majority of mob burglaries happened outside of San Francisco, though. I notice that only crimes in San Francisco require public responses from district attorney Chesa Boudin. Alameda County district attorney Nancy O’Malley is never made to answer for the very clear crime wave in Oakland right now. O’Malley virtually never appears in any publication about the endless homicides, the endless dispensary attacks, or even the freeway shootings that have killed two in the last couple months including a mother and a baby, on top of 80 freeway shootings last year in Alameda County. Nothing about district attorney Diana Becton who bears apparently no responsibility for the numerous homicides in Pittsburg and Antioch, or the burglaries in Walnut Creek. Jeff Rosen, Santa Clara County DA, home of the Lululemon and this recent shoe store mob burglary? Never heard of him.

It’s only Boudin, apparently, who’s expected to give public comment to media about crime. Why? It’s not as if he runs SFPD. He doesn’t make staffing decisions, he doesn’t decide who gets arrested and where beat patrols go. He’s a prosecutor. Because he pointed out that punitive behavior isn’t always warranted in every situation, now he’s become target #1 for all social ills in San Francisco with a recall initiative, despite no real evidence that he’s more lenient on prosecutions than his Bay Area counterparts, or that the crime wave is unique to San Francisco.

What really gets to me though is that there is a clear crime wave happening. Oakland’s at its 127th homicide as of typing this. When I started this substack 2 days ago it was at its 126th. Where’s the faces of the victims? Where’s the twitter videos? Who even are these homicide victims? With exception to the murdered KRON guard Kevin Nishita or baby Jasper Wu, we hardly even know them.

Prior to the pandemic, homicides in Oakland were at all time lows, but now the homicide levels for a second year in a row is reaching 1990s levels of death. But since these are mainly confined to East Oakland and West Oakland, and the victims are mostly Black and Brown, nobody really cares. After all, it’s where murder is expected to happen and to the people it's expected to happen to. When crime happens where it’s not supposed to happen like in suburban Walnut Creek or downtown San Francisco, suddenly it gets hyper media focus.

Louis Vuitton and Nordstrom have become incessantly repeated names as if they’re people, not 15 year old Shamara Young, 34 year old Danny McNary Jr, 41 year old Kanawa Long, 22 year old Devani Aleman Sanchez, 24 year old Suiti Mesui, 33 year old Lindsey Logue, 52 year old Dirk Tillotson, 30 year old Willie Lennon III and the list goes on. What about the numerous unidentified people who were gunned down and had their lives taken from them? The media doesn’t care because they died in the zipcodes where society has deemed it acceptable and not news worthy.

There were three instances of shootings in Oakland the weekend of the Louis Vuitton burglary. Two people—two human beings—died. Shot to death by a gun, bled out on the street with their minds in panic. One a 17 year old boy who spent over 6,000 days being born, raised, having life struggles and successes, having family, going to school — all erased in just a few seconds. No follow up stories by newspapers, no check-ins on the family from journalists. No social media outrage. Nothing.

Just another sex and age description in the homicide weekly wrap up. Public dollars goes not to the therapy for the families who lost their relatives or have been terrorized by crackling bullets, not just in Oakland or Antioch but in Bayview-Hunter’s Point or the troubled areas in downtown San Francisco, but instead to free parking and street closures for suburban Black Friday shoppers.

Are Social Media Influencers Organizing These Flash Mobs...?

MSN  |  A Chicago bus driver landed in the hospital after he was beaten on the streets Saturday night, resulting in a 15-year-old boy being arrested. 

The bus driver, 49, was inspecting his bus at about 9 p.m. after he heard a loud sound. He was reportedly pushed and punched by both a male and female, police said. An unidentified 15-year-old boy was charged with a felony count of aggravated battery of a transit employee and disorderly conduct in connection. 

Footage allegedly showing the incident has spread on social media. A large group of youths is seen surrounding the bus driver and hitting and kicking him as onlookers cheer and record the incident. 

CHICAGO WOMEN PUNCHED, SHOVED IN STRING OF ROBBERIES OVER 25-MINUTE PERIOD, POLICE SAID

Chicago police, however, did not confirm to Fox News that the video circulating shows the attack on the 49-year-old bus driver. Police directed Fox News to the "initial narrative" that only two suspects were involved and added that police "do not have any additional information."

Violence plagued the Loop in Chicago on Saturday night. A 15-year-old was shot in the arm, dozens of young people flooded the area, fights broke out, police made 21 arrests of youths, a police officer suffered a broken arm, another officer was injured, and a convenience store owner was punched in the face. 

Second Ward Alderman Brian Hopkins said police have evidence that the large groups formed due to social media influencers who organized a flash mob.

Democratic Mayor Lori Lightfoot said "swift action" will be taken and that parents need to take responsibility for their kids.

"We are going to take significant, swift action to quell any issues," Lightfoot said of the incident. "[Saturday night] there were a large number of children that were down at Millennium Park. We followed the protocols that we put in place from the summer of 2020. When it was time for them to leave the park, we made sure they left the park without incident." 

"These kids have to take responsibility, but I’m going to say the parents have to take responsibility," she said. "Do you know where your kid is? Are you making sure that you’re talking to your children about how they should act in a large crowd?"  Fist tap Dale 

Is The Organized Looting A Political Statement?

twitter |  I'm starting to think that organized looting may represent a deeper ambition to make a political statement against capitalism and "the system."

Sharing some reactions to my thread on boarded up SF below.

(A 🧵, 1/x)

First - the thread. It has reached about 15 million impressions - driven primarily by critics and trolls.

Here are the stats just of the first tweet.

Linked here:

Unroll available on Thread Reader

https://twitter.com/michelletandler/status/1465393612577853440?s=20

I went through a few hundred of the replies and quote tweets yesterday morning.

It was a painful read.

The tweets are filled with anger and hatred. If you are easily triggered do not read this thread. I was very disturbed reading these.

If you want to see my notes they are linked in this Notion Doc.

However - to summarize there were a few categories of critical responses:
1. You are evil
2. Rich/businesses/property is evil
3. Gov/System is broken
4. This is justified
5. Misc/other

First up - "you are evil". The primary arguments were:
+ You just want to shop for luxury goods
+ You just care about money/things looking good
+ You are white (and have benefited from racism)
+ You are racist

A few more from "you are evil" theme (note - there were hundreds of these):

The second theme was that the rich/businesses/ property are evil (1/2)

The World Is Upside Down And The Laws Of The Universe Shaken...,

LATimes  |  “They’re trying to move us backward,” said Melina Abdullah, co-founder of Black Lives Matter Los Angeles. “We don’t want to move backward; we want to move forward.”

Abdullah called Avant’s killing “horrific and appalling” and said Black Lives Matter mourns with her family. But she said officials must not be allowed to use Avant’s death or recent property crime to push for more policing, cash bail or other tough-on-crime measures that she said have been proved not to work.

“We need to think about what kind of economic desperation actually creates property crime and how do we get people out of that state,” Abdullah said. “How do we create livable wage jobs? How do we create affordable housing?”

Abdullah also warned against accepting claims about crime that may not have a basis in reality — which, as it happens, is something police have warned against in recent days, as concern over crime trends has escalated.

Jacqueline Avant 🕊🙏🏾 pic.twitter.com/fMyCmmmgj9

— Oprah Winfrey (@Oprah) December 2, 2021

For example, while the “follow-home” and “smash-and-grab” trends in L.A., including upticks in robberies in corridors like Melrose Avenue, have caused concern, they are not indicative of a citywide surge in property crime.

According to LAPD data through Nov. 27, property crime this year is up 2.6% over the same period last year but is down 6.6% from 2019. Robbery is up 3.9% over last year but down 13.6% from 2019. Burglaries are down 8.4% from last year and down 7.7% from 2019. Car thefts are a notable outlier, up nearly 53% from 2019.

More concerning is violent crime. Homicides are up 46.7% compared with 2019, while shooting victims are up 51.4%, according to police data. As of the end of November, there had been 359 homicides in L.A. in 2021, compared with 355 in all of 2020. There have not been more homicides in one year since 2008, which ended with 384.

In Beverly Hills, police stress that crime is rare — and killings like Avant’s even more so. Police Chief Mark Stainbrook said that despite recent incidents, Beverly Hills remains one of the safest cities in the nation.

Crime across Beverly Hills this year was down 2% as of the end of October. Violent crime in the past two years is up 23% compared with the two years prior, but the total number of such crimes remains tiny: There were just five robberies in the city in October, and homicides are rare.

It’s not clear what reforms the concerns about crime in the Los Angeles area will lead to — if any.

A crime spike in the 1990s led California to adopt policies that toughened sentences and increased incarceration. The reform movement was an acknowledgment that those policies went too far and caused their own injustices. A poll of L.A. voters released this week showed that public safety is perceived as less of a pressing problem than homelessness, housing affordability, traffic, climate change and air quality.

Jonathan Simon, a criminal justice professor at UC Berkeley’s law school and author of “Governing through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear,” said it is unlikely that crime concerns will completely derail the progressive criminal justice reform movement that began with Floyd’s killing.

However, such concern could slow those reforms, he said — showing once more “how potent the political value of crime is” and how quickly politicians and others can revert to a “crackdown” mentality.

“It’s a powerful trope now for 40 years,” Simon said.

Civilization Looks The Way It Looks Because Powerful People Have Mapped It Out This Way

caitlinjohnstone |  If your opinion about a legal case would be different if the political ideologies of those involved were reversed and all other facts and evidence remained the same, then it’s probably best not to pretend your position on the case has anything to do with facts or evidence.

People who defend US foreign policy are terrorist sympathizers.

Any time you see the US empire picking on a smaller nation just search that nation’s name plus “Belt and Road Initiative” and you’ll usually find a connection.

To get an idea of just how insane things are, there are people whose actual job is to sell policymakers on the idea that dropping more bombs would be a good thing, and those people are paid by actual bomb manufacturers.

To get an even clearer idea of how crazy things are, attempts to stop dropping bombs will be opposed on the grounds that it will hurt the jobs of bomb manufacturers. Media pundits will actually come right out and say this on nationwide TV broadcasts.

Civilization looks the way it looks because powerful people mapped it out that way. Then the storytellers of civilization come in and assure us that civilization looks this way because of an accident of democracy and rank-and-file commerce. But we never really had a hand in this.

And this mapping continues. All the plans for capitalism, Covid policies, climate change, green energy transitions etc are being planned out with no real input from the general public. The importance of our opinions begins and ends with how far we can be pushed without revolting.

 

 

Why Aren't These Negroes Stealing Anything Useful?

nbcnews |  More than a dozen people stormed a Louis Vuitton store in a Chicago suburb and were caught on surveillance footage grabbing bags and wiping shelves clear, according to police.

The theft took place at the store located in the Oakbrook Center in Oak Brook, Illinois, on Wednesday around 3:30 p.m., police said.

The footage shows the suspects, wearing masks and hooded sweatshirts, burst into the store and spread out, filling their arms with bags and other goods before dashing out.

Police said the 14 suspects all escaped the scene in three separate vehicles waiting for them. As of Friday, the Chicago Police Department recovered one of the three vehicles allegedly used in the theft: a Dodge Charger reported stolen in October out of Chicago, Oak Brook police said. 

No injuries were reported and no weapons were displayed. 

Oak Brook police said in an update Friday that the merchandise taken was worth an estimated $120,000. 

"We are still developing and working several leads to identify the offenders involved in our incident," Oak Brook police said Friday.

 

Flash-Mobbing Negroes Are Why You Can't Have Nice Things This Christmas!!!

reuters |   Police in California on Sunday were seeking about 80 suspects who they said swarmed into a Bay Area Nordstrom department store in a coordinated robbery, ransacking as much as they could carry and fleeing in cars they had parked outside.

Three people were arrested at the scene of the "organized theft" reported shortly before 9 p.m. local time on Saturday in suburban Walnut Creek, about 15 miles (25 km) east of Oakland, police said.

"The remaining participants in this criminal mob fled from the area in cars at high speeds," Walnut Creek police said in a statement on Sunday.

The robbery followed another brazen mob-heist of high-end stores on Friday night in San Francisco's Union Square, about 25 miles (40 km) to the west.

Video posted by a KNTV television reporter showed several people running out of the store with merchandise and climbing into about 25 parked cars that ringed the building and jammed traffic on the streets.

"It was crazy for a second," said Brett Barrette, a manager of a restaurant across the street, who told KPIX-TV that the thieves wore ski masks and were armed with crow bars and weapons. "All the guests inside were getting concerned."

Police said the suspects assaulted two Nordstrom employees and pepper-sprayed another. They said they are reviewing surveillance footage in an effort to identify them.

Power And Prestige Seeking In A Collapsing Economic World Order...,

interfluidity  |  I was reading Matt Stoller’s newsletter this morning:

To put it into words, the problem we have is corruption in the government contracting world, aided by immense amounts of useless overpaid make work. In 2011, an antitrust attorney did a report on how we overpay for government contracting. In service of ‘shrinking government,’ policymakers chose to set up a system where instead of hiring an engineer as a government employee for, say, $120,000 a year, they paid a consulting firm like Booz Allen $500,000 a year for a similar engineer. The resulting system is both more expensive and more bureaucratic.

Here’s one example I grabbed from a public government contracting schedule. The rate negotiated by the government’s General Services Administration for Boston Consulting Group is $33,063.75/week to get a single relatively junior contractor.

I’m certainly with Matt on general disgust at the gorging of the trough by the contactor-consultancy complex, and have long favored rebalancing government employment away from contractors, back towards directly employed civil servants. So, yay. That’s the correct position, and it’s an easy one to take, so I take it.

But it is a bit too easy. The Boston Consulting Group may be charging $33,063.75 per week for the services of a single kind-of-bright conformist straight out of business school. But that kid, he isn’t getting paid $1.7M a year. He’s probably “only” paid 10% of that. From that take, his managers and their managers, their assistants and his, not to mention of course the firm’s shareholders, are all getting a piece of that sweet government slop. And all those guys and gals, they are living in places like Arlington, VA, and some of them have families and mortgages on houses they indebted themselves perhaps millions of dollars to inhabit.

There are people at the top of the American food chain who are stupid rich, for whom questions of making ends meet and financial security are laughably distant. People like that, they are easy to deal with. If it was “us” (whoever the fuck we are) versus only them, politics would be easy. We’d have taxed the billionaires to pay their fair share a long time ago.

But most of the people towards the top of the American food chain are not stupid rich, but stupidly rich. They “make” sums of money that by any fair reckoning, obviously in a global context but even in an American context, are huge. But they plow that affluence into bidding wars on incredibly (if artificially) scarce social goods. Nobody “needs” to live in Arlington (or my own San Francisco). No one’s kid “has” to go to private school (or for the more woke among us, notionally public schools rendered exclusive by the cost of nearby housing). If you make price your first priority in, say, shopping for preschool or daycare, perhaps you can find something reasonable.

But most of us, if we are no longer free, young, and single, if we are rich enough to pay the vig you have to pay to be sure your kid’s preschool will in fact be “safe” and “nurturing”, well, we pay it. If we haven’t rigged our housing choice so that the local public school is good enough, we pay up for a private school. If we can afford to be choosy, if we are really rich, we pay up for the private school that devotes significant resources to the searches and scholarships that deliver, in Nikole Hannah-Jones memorable words, a “carefully curated integration, the kind that allows many white parents to boast that their children’s public schools look like the United Nations.” It is extraordinarily expensive to be both comfortable and some facsimile of virtuous. You’ll never see as many rainbow flags as you see in Marin County.

The point of this is not that you should have sympathy for the Arlingtonians (or San Franciscans). Fuck ’em (er, us). But you are missing something important, as a matter of politics if nothing else, if you don’t get that the people who are your predators financially are, in their turn, someone else’s prey. Part of why the legalized corruption that is the vast bulk of the (dollar-weighted) US economy is so immovable is that the people whose lobbyists have cornered markets to ensure they stay overpaid are desperately frightened of not being overpaid, because if they were not overpaid they would become unable to make all the absurd overpayments that are now required to live what people of my generation (and race, and class) understood to be an ordinary life. It’s turtles all the way down, each one collecting a toll and wondering how it’s gonna pay the next diapsid.

Perhaps the most straightforward examples of all this, much more sympathetic than Boston Consulting Group swindlers, are doctors. It’s well and good to rail against health insurance companies and big pharma, and really, fuck ’em so hard they disappear into perpetual orgasm and we never have to encounter them again. But we know that healthcare in the US is exorbitantly expensive compared to anywhere else, and we also know, even if it is not shouted as loudly in political stump speeches, that a big part of this is that doctors are paid roughly twice as much in America as they are paid elsewhere in the developed world.

But what would it mean, really, to cut US doctors’ salaries in half? In theory, if you are the most imperceptive sort of economist, it means they could live as well as doctors do in Europe, which is not so bad. US doctors are paid twice as much in what is imaginatively described as “real terms”, so they should be able to purchase the same goods and services with their income as their European peers do. Where’s the problem?

But economists’ “real terms” do not measure the realest terms at all, the social relations in which the dance of our production and consumption is embedded. If you cut doctors’ salaries in half tomorrow, they would have to sell their mortgaged, absurdly expensive homes. At half their present salary, doctors would no longer be able to afford to live amongst “peer” professions like lawyers, management consultants, middling corporate executives, and the employees of surveillance monopolists. Doctors would fall precipitously from the social class, embedded in geography and consumption habits, to which many of them even now cling only precariously. More calamitously, they would lose the capacity to produce or reproduce membership in that social class for their children, often the most expensive amenity American professionals seek to purchase.

Doctors in France don’t have this problem because they live in a society less stratified than the one that we are unfortunate to inhabit. In societies in which the lives and prospects of the rich and less rich are not so divergent, people can afford to be a bit less rich. After all, even in the United States, the problem is not scarcity in a straightforward economic sense. We can build, to a first approximation, as much great housing as we want. The skills required to care for and educate kids are reproducible. They could be elastically and economically supplied. The scarcity of a slot at Harvard (and that slot’s many antecedents, all the way back to birth) has little to do with some ingrained incapacity to educate wonderful teachers.

The solution to the problem of “positional goods”, which are inherently zero-sum and inelastically supplied, is supposed to be the infinite multiplicity of social dimensions over which we can measure our positions (ht Arjun Narayan). The most famous exposition of this view is perhaps David Brooks’ from On Paradise Drive:

“Know thyself,” the Greek philosopher advised. But of course this is nonsense. In the world of self-reinforcing clique communities, the people who are truly happy live by the maxim “Overrate thyself.” They live in a community that reinforces their values every day. The anthropology professor can stride through life knowing she was unanimously elected chairwoman of her crunchy suburb’s sustainable-growth study seminar. She wears the locally approved status symbols: the Tibet-motif dangly earrings, the Andrea Dworkin-inspired hairstyle, the peasant blouse, and the public-broadcasting tote bag… Meanwhile, sitting in the next seat of the coach section on some Southwest Airlines flight, there might be a midlevel executive from a postwar suburb who’s similarly rich in self-esteem. But he lives in a different clique, so he is validated and reinforced according to entirely different criteria and by entirely different institutions… [H]e has been named Payroll Person of the Year by the West Coast Regional Payroll Professional Association. He is interested in College Football and tassels. His loafers have tassels. His golf bags have tassels. If he could put tassels around the Oklahoma football vanity license plate on his Cadillac Escalade, his life would be complete.

It’s hard to know, from this excerpt, which of these two is richer, the anthropology professor or the payroll guy. Both crouch together in the eternal middle class of unreserved coach seating on a Southwest Airlines flight. And in that skyward netherworld, On Paradise Flight, Brooks would be right. When there are not objective correlates of anyone’s definition of positional status, each of us can choose whichever measure of position flatters us most. We need agree only that is it gauche to try to impose our values on others for us all to live as happiest and best, quietly pitying our inferiors even as we cheerfully pass along a bag of pretzels.

But what it means to live in a stratified society, precisely what it means to live in a stratified society, is that there are objective correlates to position along dimensions that individuals and communities cannot themselves choose. There are positional dimensions whose importance is a social fact, not arbitrary, but real as social facts are, by virtue of their consequences. In such a society, positional goods with desirable correlates, inherently scarce and inelastically supplied, become extremely valuable. In some societies, those goods may be rationed by custom, or by heredity, by caste or race. But to the degree that a society is “liberal” and capitalist, they will be price-rationed, as they largely (but incompletely) are in our American society.

Has McKinsey Been Crafting The Plans To Kill Off People?

The pathological elite of this country are in process of narratizing themselves through a controlled population decline. All institutions of public health seemingly accepting this top-down narrative. 

Mckinsey was the major force multiplier of the opioid crisis, and it is because of that fact that when I read this piece on the panicdemic, I'm drawn to conclude that the plan is simply to kill off people. Whether opioid addiction or viral contagion, the plan is simply to kill off unprofitable population. 

After all, it was McKinsey who advised the Sacklers how to make more money than god selling opioids legally. (coincidentally, this program coincided with the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan from whence tons of opium were exported back to the U.S.) The result was deaths of addiction and despair all across the country, by prescription. 

McKinsey gives out the usual one size fits all advice to everyone, streamline your business, make sales triple, socialize your costs, demand tax exemptions… I can even remember – less than 10 years ago – walking into same-day surgery and seeing big stickers on the floor both advertising opiod pain killers and advising to take them with caution. Laughable because when you are in serious pain post surgery, you are inclined to pop that stuff like candy. And then ask for more. I wonder if McKinsey advised Pharma to install advertisements in hospitals. 

That certainly sounds like McKinsey.  

Why Did The NIH Just Re-Define Gain Of Function Research?

So to sum it up: 

1. US bans gain-of-function research. 

2. Rogue bureaucrats fund it abroad instead. 

3. Lab leak occurs. Global pandemic ensues. 

4. Scientific leaders lie about it and label dissenters as racists. Want to create a crisis of trust in science? 

That’ll do it.

 

For those that don’t know - this is how the @NIH defined “gain-of-function” on their website until at least October 19th, 2021. Just 3 days ago.

It looks like this section was deleted, and the page was edited, within the last 2-3 days. @R_H_Ebright @RandPaul pic.twitter.com/wZ9Iy5vWaT

— Jeremy Redfern (@JeremyRedfernFL) October 22, 2021

The Real Culture War Is A Battle Between What People Need vs What Money Wants

GodsSpies |   “The news media are not independent; they are a sort of bulletin board and public relations firm for the ruling class—the people who run things. Those who decide what news you will or will not hear are paid by, and tolerated purely at the whim of, those who hold economic power. If the parent corporation doesn’t want you to know something, it won’t be on the news. Period. Or, at the very least, it will be slanted to suit them, and then rarely followed up.”
— George Carlin, quoted here

It's going to be interesting to see, in the next five to fifteen years, the methods the rich must use to keep their power when the climate crisis hits with full and majestic force. The coming chaos and revolutionary fervor that suffering millions and billions will bring to the table will each be world-historical in scope. What under those conditions will the powerful do, the very very few, to keep the very many from taking control? Whatever the result, none of our governments will survive in their current form.

Keep in mind, revolutions are not orderly, and this one almost certainly won't be well led. Yes, from time to time, the world kicks out a George Washington, fit for the challenge of his time, a man who willing to fortify the republic he helped to build rather than just profit from it.

And yes, from time to time the world kicks out a Napoleon or Vespasian, a man fit to rule his time well, at least for the most part, even if that rule is decidedly autocratic.

But most of the time the world kicks out masters of chaos, egomaniacal destroyers and opportunists, people like Alcibiades of Athens, or Ronald Reagan, people who gain power in disgruntled times, and through their actions make the world worse for everyone. Reagan took a struggling country, the proto-neoliberal nation of the Carter years, a nation steeped in stagflation, and set in fatal motion the wealth machine that will soon destroy us all, including the machine itself.

If we don't get off of fossil fuel in time, the rich will suffer with the rest of us the destruction they will cause. Our leaders won't contemplate any measure that reduces their power, and we won't contemplate forcing them to leave. Under those constraints, the problem has no solution.

The rich won't stand down. Will the people stand up? On that one question hangs all of the rest of this tale.

 

Coercion Works!

npr |  In the quest to get more Americans vaccinated, one thing is becoming increasingly clear: Vaccine mandates work.

Nowhere is that more apparent than at United Airlines. On Aug. 6, United became the first U.S. airline to tell its workers to get vaccinated against COVID-19 if they wanted to keep their jobs.

The company says 99.5% of United employees have been vaccinated, not counting the roughly 2,000 who have applied for religious or medical exemptions. Elsewhere, other employers also report success with mandates. Tyson Foods, New York City schools, major hospital systems in Maine and the NBA are among those with vaccination rates topping 90%.

Taking the shot isn't an easy decision for many people. One of them was Margaret Applegate, a San Francisco-based customer service agent with United for 29 years. She was proud of how United had handled the pandemic up until then — the lengths the airline had gone to for keeping workers and customers safe, even partnering with Clorox on cleaning and disinfecting.

Now she no longer felt so proud.

Applegate, who is 57, had not gotten vaccinated. Like many people, she was scared. She'd heard from friends in the U.S. and abroad about bad reactions to the shots, and she worried that the vaccine could exacerbate her heart condition.

She was also uneasy about how quickly the COVID-19 vaccines had been developed and authorized for use.

"I thought that was a little bit too rushed. It just felt too rushed," she says.

Still, she wrestled with what to do. She was troubled by the death of a co-worker from COVID-19 and the diminished health of another co-worker who had been hospitalized with the virus and survived. She recognized the vaccine mandate as her company's final push to keep employees safe.

 

Once The Shine Of Trust Is Off Authoriteh - Its Mob Tactics Become Plain For All To See

 LATimes |  On paper, the deputies are scattered around the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department in various assignments. One is supposed to be working patrol in Lancaster, another in West Hollywood. A third is assigned to a gang crime unit.

In reality, though, the group of nine men and women make up a little-known team of investigators formed by Sheriff Alex Villanueva and other top sheriff’s officials.

Much of what they do, by design, is a mystery to the public and even to most within the department. But as some of the investigations handled by the team have come to light, a common thread has emerged: Their targets are outspoken critics of Villanueva or the department.

The unit, named the Civil Rights and Public Integrity Detail, has pursued a long-running investigation into one of Villanueva’s most vocal critics, L.A. County Inspector General Max Huntsman, and others despite sheriff’s officials being told by the FBI and state law enforcement officials that it appeared no crimes had been committed, a senior sheriff’s official said.

The team also has an open criminal inquiry into a nonprofit that is run by a member of a county board that oversees the sheriff and is associated with county Supervisor Sheila Kuehl, both of whom have clashed fiercely with Villanueva and called for his resignation.

Concern over the team has caused consternation both inside and outside the department. Even the union representing rank-and-file deputies put out a warning that a member of the detail was using “unconventional tactics” to question deputies. 

George Gascón, the county’s district attorney, decided he wanted nothing to do with the unit after sheriff’s officials proposed the two agencies create a task force to collaborate on public corruption investigations.

“He’s only targeting political enemies,” Gascón told The Times about Villanueva. “It was obvious that was not the kind of work I wanted to engage in, so we declined.”

Shortly after Gascón refused to partner with the Sheriff’s Department, Villanueva came out as a strong supporter of a recall campaign to kick the district attorney out of office.

The unit has spurred a bitter confrontation between Villanueva and the Civilian Oversight Commission, which oversees the sheriff and his agency. Commission members say they fear the sheriff is using it to intimidate people who challenge him and to score points in personal vendettas, not conduct legitimate inquiries into possible crimes.

Cornpop (Biden) Corrupt As Hail - And You Cain't Do A Dayyum Thing About It!!!

greenwald |  A severe escalation of the war on a free internet and free discourse has taken place over the last twelve months. Numerous examples of brute and dangerous censorship have emerged: the destruction by Big Tech monopolies of Parler at the behest of Democratic politicians at the time that it was the most-downloaded app in the country; the banning of the sitting president from social media; and the increasingly explicit threats from elected officials in the majority party of legal and regulatory reprisals in the event that tech platforms do not censor more in accordance with their demands.

But the most severe episode of all was the joint campaign — in the weeks before the 2020 election — by the CIA, Big Tech, the liberal wing of the corporate media and the Democratic Party to censor and suppress a series of major reports about then-presidential frontrunner Joe Biden. On October 14 and then October 15, 2020, The New York Post, the nation's oldest newspaper, published two news reports on Joe Biden's activities in Ukraine and China that raised serious questions about his integrity and ethics: specifically whether he and his family were trading on his name and influence to generate profit for themselves. The Post said that the documents were obtained from a laptop left by Joe Biden's son Hunter at a repair shop.

From the start, the evidence of authenticity was overwhelming. The Post published obviously genuine photos of Hunter that were taken from the laptop. Investigations from media outlets found people who had received the emails in real-time and they compared the emails in their possession to the ones in the Post's archive, and they matched word-for-word. One of Hunter's own business associates involved in many of these deals, Tony Bobulinski, confirmed publicly and in interviews that the key emails were genuine and that they referenced Joe Biden's profit participation in one deal being pursued in China. A forensics analyst issued a report concluding the archive had all the earmarks of authenticity. Not even the Bidens denied that the emails were real: something they of course would have done if they had been forged or altered. In sum, as someone who has reported on numerous large archives similar to this one and was faced with the heavy burden of ensuring the documents were genuine before risking one's career and reputation by reporting them, it was clear early on that all the key metrics demonstrated that these documents were real.

Despite all that, former intelligence officials such as Obama's CIA Director John Brennan and his Director of National Intelligence James Clapper led a group of dozens of former spooks in issuing a public statement that disseminated an outright lie: namely, that the laptop was "Russian disinformation.” Note that this phrase contains two separate assertions: 1) the documents came from Russia and 2) they are fake ("disinformation"). The intelligence officials admitted in this letter that — in their words — “we do not know if the emails are genuine or not,” and also admitted that “we do not have evidence of Russian involvement.” Yet it repeatedly insinuated that everyone should nonetheless believe this:

Letter from 60 former intelligence officials about the New York Post reporting, Oct. 19, 2020

But the complete lack of evidence for these claims — that even these career CIA liars acknowledged plagued their assertions — did not stop the corporate media or Big Tech from repeating this lie over and over, and, far worse, using this lie to censor this reporting from the internet. One of the first to spread this lie was the co-queen of Russiagate frauds, Natasha Bertrand, then of Politico and now promoted, because of lies like this, to CNN. “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say,” blared her headline in Politico on October 19, just five days after the Post began its reporting. From there, virtually every media outlet — CNN, NBC News, PBS, Huffington Post, The Intercept, and too many others to count — began completely ignoring the substance of the reporting and instead spread the lie over and over that these documents were the by-product of Russian disinformation.

America Is In Full Collapse Now And Nowhere Near As Resiliant As The USSR Was

permaculturenews |  The next circle of denial revolves around what must inevitably come to pass if the Goddess of Technology were to fail us: a series of wars over ever more scarce resources. Paul Roberts, who is very well informed on the subject of peak oil, has this to say: "what desperate states have always done when resources turn scarce… [is] fight for them." [ MotherJones.com, 11/12 2004] Let us not argue that this has never happened, but did it ever amount to anything more than a futile gesture of desperation? Wars take resources, and, when resources are already scarce, fighting wars over resources becomes a lethal exercise in futility. Those with more resources would be expected to win. I am not arguing that wars over resources will not occur. I am suggesting that they will be futile, and that victory in these conflicts will be barely distinguishable from defeat. I would also like to suggest that these conflicts would be self-limiting: modern warfare uses up prodigious amounts of energy, and if the conflicts are over oil and gas installations, then they will get blown up, as has happened repeatedly in Iraq. This will result in less energy being available and, consequently, less warfare.

Take, for example, the last two US involvements in Iraq. In each case, as a result of US actions, Iraqi oil production decreased. It now appears that the whole strategy is a failure. Supporting Saddam, then fighting Saddam, then imposing sanctions on Saddam, then finally overthrowing him, has left Iraqi oil fields so badly damaged that the "ultimate recoverable" estimate for Iraqi oil is now down to 10-12% of what was once thought to be underground (according to the New York Times).

Some people are even suggesting a war over resources with a nuclear endgame. On this point, I am optimistic. As Robert McNamara once thought, nuclear weapons are too difficult to use. And although he has done a great deal of work to make them easier to use, with the introduction of small, tactical, battlefield nukes and the like, and despite recently renewed interest in nuclear "bunker busters," they still make a bit of a mess, and are hard to work into any sort of a sensible strategy that would reliably lead to an increased supply of energy. Noting that conventional weapons have not been effective in this area, it is unclear why nuclear weapons would produce better results.

But these are all details; the point I really want to make is that proposing resource wars, even as a worst-case scenario, is still a form of denial. The implicit assumption is this: if all else fails, we will go to war; we will win; the oil will flow again, and we will be back to business as usual in no time. Again, I would suggest against waiting around for the success of a global police action to redirect the lion’s share of the dwindling world oil supplies toward the United States.

Outside this last circle of denial lies a vast wilderness called the Collapse of Western Civilization, roamed by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, or so some people will have you believe. Here we find not denial but escapism: a hankering for a grand finale, a heroic final chapter. Civilizations do collapse – this is one of the best-known facts about them – but as anyone who has read The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire will tell you, the process can take many centuries.

What tends to collapse rather suddenly is the economy. Economies, too, are known to collapse, and do so with far greater regularity than civilizations. An economy does not collapse into a black hole from which no light can escape. Instead, something else happens: society begins to spontaneously reconfigure itself, establish new relationships, and evolve new rules, in order to find a point of equilibrium at a lower rate of resource expenditure.

Note that the exercise carries a high human cost: without an economy, many people suddenly find themselves as helpless as newborn babes. Many of them die, sooner than they would otherwise: some would call this a "die-off." There is a part of the population that is most vulnerable: the young, the old, and the infirm; the foolish and the suicidal. There is also another part of the population that can survive indefinitely on insects and tree bark. Most people fall somewhere in between.

Economic collapse gives rise to new, smaller and poorer economies. That pattern has been repeated many times, so we can reason inductively about similarities and differences between a collapse that has already occurred and one that is about to occur. Unlike astrophysicists, who can confidently predict whether a given star will collapse into a neutron star or a black hole based on measurements and calculations, we have to work with general observations and anecdotal evidence. However, I hope that my thought experiment will allow me to guess correctly at the general shape of the new economy, and arrive at survival strategies that may be of use to individuals and small communities.

Vaccine Effectiveness - The Israeli Data Is Ominous At This Time

“Vaccine efficacy and vaccine effectiveness measure the proportionate reduction in cases among vaccinated persons. Vaccine efficacy is used when a study is carried out under ideal conditions, for example, during a clinical trial. Vaccine effectiveness is used when a study is carried out under typical field (that is, less than perfectly controlled) conditions.” according to the CDC.

 

With our warped medical leaders, politicians, pharma-profiteers and big media now feeding us “Delta Variant” swill as if we were caged pigs, a few things may be of use to better frame our perspectives and understandings on this, —the latest CDC etc. Narrative Operation.

 

Israel is now reporting Vaccine Effectiveness for covid shots at 39%-40%.

 

Haaretz, quoting Israel’s director of public health services, Dr. Sharon Alroy-Preis, has her stating [dateline Aug. 1, 2021]: “Previously we thought that fully vaccinated individuals are protected, but we now see that vaccine effectiveness is roughly 40 percent.”

 

Alroy-Preis stated fully half, or 50% of the current infections in Israel are among those fully vaccinated.

 

And she told Haaretz: “we see a drop in the vaccine effectiveness against disease for those who have been vaccinated early on, and we see it for both elderly people over the age of 60 but also for the younger.”

 

This means that the claimed ~40% VE is in fact going down as she speaks.

 

What will the actual VE end up being?

 

During a March 2021 interview with France 24, Alroy-Preis said 80 percent in that country eligible were already vaccinated against Covid-19 — claiming: “You can get to a point in this pandemic where you open sectors and the disease goes down.”

 

Her March claims, along with her credibility have gone up in smoke as the Zionist Entity begins more draconian lockdowns etc. in a matter of days.

 

And we also have more fantasy, masquerading as science from New England Journal of Medicine, dateline July 21, 2021.

 

This NEJM work on behalf of big pharma — and not on our behalf at all — has been recently used to create the illusion that covax VE can do what has never been, regarding influenza vax’.

 

“With the BNT162b2 vaccine, the effectiveness of two doses was 93.7%” NEJM says, and also states: “88.0% (95% CI, 85.3 to 90.1) among those with the delta variant.”

 

This is hyped at top of this paper, in third paragraph under results.

 

Fourth paragraph: “This finding would support efforts to maximize vaccine uptake with two doses among vulnerable populations. (Funded by Public Health England.)”

 

Way down,
27th paragraph: “The numbers of cases and follow-up periods are currently insufficient for the estimation of vaccine effectiveness against severe disease, including hospitalization and death.”

 

Here is the NEJM, publishing a paper titled, “Effectiveness of Covid-19 Vaccines against the B.1.617.2 (Delta) Variant” — and none of the 12 authors, plus “et al.” — none of them had the skill set to recognize they are violating the VE definition!

 

“Vaccine efficacy/effectiveness (VE) is measured by calculating the risk of disease among vaccinated and unvaccinated persons and determining the percentage reduction in risk of disease among vaccinated persons relative to unvaccinated persons.”

 

VE includes measuring against disease — whether mild, moderate, severe, and deadly.

 

And this, published in NEJM!?!

 

Be that as it may, prior to March 2020, it was widely accepted: that 40% VE was “OK” for the CDC — even as they for decades claimed they wanted at least 90%.

 

When the drug pushers claimed with zero evidence in November, in concordance with the Emergency Use Authorizations for Moderna and Pfizer, they were claiming the impossible, at least, what has always been impossible: any VE better than 50% for influenza vaccination’.

 

It was ON PURPOSE the medical charlatans and vaccine fanatics in charge of this criminal operation pretended not to know the obvious about VE.

 

These false expectations of 90% and higher for covid shots — the “experts” all knew all along this was myth, a fairy tale — their science fiction posing as scientific knowledge. . . and the false expectations they created obviously totally inappropriate: and now they are stuck in their own contradictions. [But they got their EUA, and got to pillage the lands far and wide with their experimental poison, now appearing to be creating potential catastrophe. As we will see below, this is exactly what the CDC is now saying; however, they are not stating this obviousness in a rational and coherent manner. Rather, in a way that in effect blames us for it. But what else is new?]

 

The gaslighting continues.

 

This CDC graph shows last 11 years of VE: 43% average VE, for influenza.

 

And depending on the type of flu — it was completely worthless during 2018/2019 flu season for those aged 9 – 49 years old: EV = 3%, for H3N2, that season.

 

And those 50-64: zero VE.

 

The 40% VE rate [and dropping] that Israel is now reporting would have been considered normal — unacceptable, yes; normal, also yes.

 

Googling “Vaccine Effectiveness” and covid VE, you won’t find anything, in US, on this essential matter — though our dear CDC Director Rochelle Walensky is ‘weighing in’:

 

“The largest concern that I think we in public health and sciences are worried about is that virus and potential mutations. . . the potential to evade our vaccine in terms of how it protects us from severe disease and death,” Walensky said last week.

 

“Right now, fortunately, we are not there. These vaccines operate really well in protecting us from severe disease and death,” she said. “But the big concern is the next area that might emerge, just a few mutations potentially away, could potentially evade our vaccines,” the CDC director said.

In other words: VE = 0 . . . . Zero vaccine effectiveness. 

 

This is the kernel of the on-purpose-created mass confusion, of which Walensky is directly complicit.

 

Vaccines unable to prevent disease spread are worthless.

 

As Dr. Meryl Nass, MD, put it: “This is called community spread, and when you cannot identify where the virus was picked up, and you refuse to treat contacts with effective post-exposure drugs, then Track and Trace is simply an expensive, bad joke.”

 

And worse, the CDC director is trying to pretend she and her agency don’t know where the spread is originating!

 

“In an unvaccinated person, the virus does not encounter the same evolutionary pressure to mutate into something stronger. So, if SARS-CoV-2 does end up mutating into more lethal strains, then mass vaccination is the most likely driver,” he said.

 

To sum up, what the science fiction likes of Walensky et al. are trying to obscure is that the overall VE for covid shots may end up being as bad as the 2018/2019 influenza season.

 

Overall VE is how the CDC has always reported VE; and they would also break that down to subset by the different influenza strains and clades as need be.

 

“Delta” is part of the “novel” corona subset. We’ll see what the data says — someday.

Time To Start Mandating Covid mRNA Jabs

mediaite |  CNN medical analyst Dr. Jonathan Reiner told Erin Burnett Thursday that he believed it was “time to start mandating vaccines” — and recognizing that while the government could not do so, he applauded efforts by employers, colleges, and other private organizations to require the Covid-19 vaccine.

Burnett introduced the segment by mentioning the news that Pfizer would be filming for emergency use authorization for a third booster shot, in part to increase efficacy against the highly contagious delta variant.

“There’s still a third of the population in the United States that hasn’t got a single dose” of the vaccine, said Burnett, and the Biden administration has said that “it’s not their role to mandate people get vaccinated,” instead going for a persuasive message. She played a montage of President Joe Biden and several members of his administration urging Americans to “please get vaccinated now.”

“Given where things are going, is it time to move on from saying please to mandating?” Burnett asked.

“I do think it’s time to start mandating vaccines,” Reiner replied. “And I think that the private industry and private organizations will do that. At GW university where I work, starting in fall, you can’t be on campus unless you’re fully vaccinated.”

Currently, Reiner said, 75 million adults in the U.S. have chosen not to get vaccinated. “That choice has consequences. Now, we can’t force you to take a jab in the arm. But there are many jobs, perhaps, that can prevent you from working if you decide not to get vaccinated. So I think we need to be more proactive and we will see industry take the lead in this.”

The Lie And The Cover-up Only Ever Magnify The Heinousness Of The Crime...,

medialens  |  As we have pointed out since Media Lens began in 2001, a fundamental feature of corporate media is propaganda by omission. Over the past week, a stunning example has highlighted this core property once again.

A major witness in the US case against Julian Assange has just admitted fabricat­ing key accusati­ons in the indictment against the Wikileaks founder. These dramatic revelations emerged in an extensive article published on 26 June in Stundin, an Icelandic newspaper. The paper interviewed the witness, Sigurdur Ingi Thordarson, a former WikiLeaks volunteer, who admitted that he had made false allegations against Assange after being recruited by US authorities. Thordarson, who has several convictions for sexual abuse of minors and financial fraud, began working with the US Department of Justice and the FBI after receiving a promise of immunity from prosecution. He even admitted to continuing his crime spree while working with the US authorities.

Last summer, US officials had presented an updated version of their indictment against Assange to Magistrate Court Judge Vanessa Baraitser at the Old Bailey in London. Key to this update was the assertion that Assange had instructed Thordarson to commit computer intrusions or hacking in Iceland. 

As the Stundin article reported:

‘The aim of this addition to the indictment was apparently to shore up and support the conspiracy charge against Assange in relation to his interactions with Chelsea Manning. Those occurred around the same time he resided in Iceland and the authors of the indictment felt they could strengthen their case by alleging he was involved in illegal activity there as well. This activity was said to include attempts to hack into the computers of members of [the Icelandic] parliament and record their conversations.

‘In fact, Thordarson now admits to Stundin that Assange never asked him to hack or access phone recordings of MPs.’

Judge Baraitser’s ruling on 4 January, 2021 was against extradition to the US. But she did so purely on humanitarian grounds concerning Assange’s health, suicide risk and the extreme conditions he would face in confinement in US prisons.

The Stundin article continued:

‘With regards to the actual accusations made in the indictment Baraitser sided with the arguments of the American legal team, including citing the specific samples from Iceland which are now seriously called into question.

‘Other misleading elements can be found in the indictment, and later reflected in the Magistrate’s judgement, based on Thordarson’s now admitted lies.’

The Stundin article further details Thordarson’s lies and deceptions, including mispresenting himself as an official representative of WikiLeaks while a volunteer in 2010-2011, even impersonating Assange, and embezzling more than $50,000 from the organisation.

By August 2011, Thordarson was being pursued by WikiLeaks staff trying to locate the missing funds. In fact, Thordarson had arranged for the money to be sent to his private bank account by forging an email in Assange’s name. That month, Thordarson sought a way out by contacting the US Embassy in Iceland, offering to be an informant in the case against Assange.

The Collapse Crime Epidemic Has Only Just Begun

cbsnews  |  Even as the nation rebounds from the coronavirus pandemic, more than 2 million homeowners are behind on their mortgages and risk being forced out of their homes in a matter of weeks, a new Harvard University housing report warns.

Most of the homeowners at risk of foreclosure are either low-income or families of color, said researchers who published the 2021 State of the Nation's Housing report. Congress has dedicated $10 billion to help homeowners get caught up on payments, but it's unclear if that funding will make it to families before mortgage companies begin sending out foreclosure notices, researchers say.

Separately, millions more renters are "on the brink of eviction," the Harvard researchers found. Census data show that 6 million households are still behind on rent and could face eviction at the end of June, when federal eviction protections expire. 

The Center for Disease Control order halting some evictions, and federal liminations on foreclosures for federally-backed housing, both expire on June 30. Housing advocates have pushed for the Biden administration to extend both, but there is no indication an extension will happen.

"With so many renters in financial distress, there are concerns about an impending wave of evictions," the Harvard report said.

More than 7 million homeowners took advantage of the foreclosure moratorium passed as part of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act last spring. The provision was later extended by the Biden White House. As of March 2021, most of those homeowners have started repaying lenders and some are even up to date with their lenders. But that leaves about 2.1 million still behind on their mortgages, researchers said.

American Cities Face A Collapse Crime Epidemic

NYTimes |  Most city leaders, eager to rejuvenate downtown economies, have lifted coronavirus restrictions. But rising violent crime has kept both residents and tourists at home.

Mayors of American cities have yearned for the moment they could usher in a return to normalcy, casting away coronavirus restrictions on bars, restaurants, parties and public gatherings.

Yet now, even with reopenings underway across the United States as the pandemic recedes, city leaders must contend with another crisis: a crime wave with no signs of ending.

They are cheerleading the return of office workers to downtowns and encouraging tourists to visit, eager to rejuvenate the economy and build public confidence. But they are also frantically trying to quell a surge of homicides, assaults and carjackings that began during the pandemic and has cast a chill over the recovery.

In Austin, Texas, for example, 14 people were injured early Saturday morning in a mass shooting as revelers jammed a popular downtown nightlife district.

Some city officials have touted progressive strategies focused on community policing in neighborhoods where trust between police officers and residents has frayed. Others have deployed more traditional tactics like increasing surveillance cameras in troubled areas and enforcing curfews in city parks to clear out crowds, as the police did in Washington Square Park in Manhattan in recent days.

In Chicago, which fully reopened on Friday, Mayor Lori Lightfoot made clear that her focus was on reducing violence over the summer, and that her administration would focus resources on 15 high-crime pockets of the city as part of that effort.

“We owe it to all of our residents, in every neighborhood, to bring peace and vibrancy back,” Ms. Lightfoot said.