Tag: BLM

In the Wake of Looting, San Francisco a “Ghost Town”

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The NY Post reports that in the wake of smash and grab looting of some of the most expensive stores in San Francisco the store owners have boarded up their store and hired security guards to protect their businesses and employees from the threat.

The end quote encapsulates the situation.

“Being soft on criminals has its consequences. For San Francisco, the result is a ghost town. For decades, this Bay Area destination has held conferences where it held itself up to the world as a model of a “livable, walkable” city.

Not any more.

“People are scared to go downtown,” native resident Tandler told me.

“This is the destruction of a city.””

 

 

 

 

What Have We Learned from Kyle Rittenhouse?

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The verdict just came in for this 18-year-old kid and like most everyone on our side I am greatly relieved that at least for now, this kid’s life has been given back to him.  It’s still possible that Merrick Garland and the rest of the vampires in the Biden Justice Department may still decide to persecute him under some bogus civil rights charade but maybe their plate is full right now persecuting the poor bastards from Jan. 6th and the school parents in Virginia.  But if he is free and clear what is the takeaway we have from this incident?

Well, for me the takeaway is that the Antifa/BLM organization is a paramilitary group that has weapons and tactics that can only be resisted by individuals armed and trained to do so.  Which tells me that the only way to avoid being subject to their attacks and harassment is to live in a jurisdiction where the police will arrest them if they riot.  That was Kyle Rittenhouse’s mistake.  He assumed that because he was heavily armed and fairly proficient with his weapon that he would be immune from harassment by the protestors.  That mistake could have cost him his life either at the scene or later in a court of law.  He was only saved by luck,  the copious video evidence of his actions being self-defense, the skill of his attorney to portray this evidence clearly and convincingly and the fact that he had an honest judge.

As far as I know, Florida is the only state that has passed laws to protect its citizens against municipal governments that decide to empower BLM rioters by handcuffing the police.  But that is the only way to prevent places like Atlanta, St. Louis, Houston and all the other blue cities in red states from harming red state citizens.  So, short of moving to Florida the strategy is living far enough from a blue city in a red state to avoid a barbarian invasion.

And honestly that’s the only lesson.  Anyone who attempts to do what Rittenhouse did will end up no better than he did and most probably a whole lot worse.  This problem can only be addressed by the united front of a whole community.  And that doesn’t exist in places like Wisconsin or Virginia and certainly not in New York or California.  In places like that BLM is the legitimate militia.  They are recognized to have the right to burn, loot and kill people who happen to be in the path of their swarm.  Maybe someday a counterforce will emerge on its own and challenge BLM and its protectors but that is far in the future.  That won’t happen until the people being attacked have nothing to lose and just rise up against their tormentors.  Maybe that’ll be in California.  Probably it’ll be the Hispanic people living in areas adjacent to the inner-city no-go zones.  When no one else will help them, they’ll pay protection money to the gangs and the gangs will handle the swarm by fighting fire with fire.

But that won’t be of any help to us.  Our lives are wrapped up in the fabric of civilized society and so we will have to live where that society still exists.  So that’s my takeaway from the Rittenhouse story.  Live where the majority of people will support the police protecting citizens from barbarians.  It’s a cautionary tale and an object lesson about where not to live.

What is BLM’s Mission?

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It’s in the name, right?  Black Lives Matter.  That means that blacks have been illegally targeted by the police for no good reason.  That’s been the narrative used since Obama’s regime was running the FBI.  And yet, every one of the alleged victims was a thug.  Treyvon Martin, Michael Brown, George Floyd and the rest of their less well-known associates.  Each one was killed either committing a violent assault or resisting arrest.

What that tells me is that the goal is to make black criminals immune from arrest.  This requires that the police will be prevented from using force to subdue dangerous criminals.  So, if you commit a robbery or even a murder all you have to do is resist and fight your way out of the arrest.

And how do you make something like this happen?  Easy.  You do it in blue cities and you use the FBI to frighten the cops into laying down.  After what happened to the cops who were involved in the Michael Brown and George Floyd cases it’s obvious that there will be no justice for police involved.  They will be the criminals and the thugs will be the heroes.

And now that the police have been neutered, the looting and burning is a part of daily life taken for granted by the urban dwellers in places like Portland and Seattle.  These activities are studiously ignored by the FBI.  And the FBI is the branch of the federal government that was specifically created to deal with organized crime.  But Antifa and BLM have a free pass.  They’re ignored but a kid like Kyle Rittenhouse has helicopters following him to make sure the prosecution has all the evidence they might need to send him to jail for life for trying to stop the mob from burning down another city.

I read that Ron DeSantis has enacted new legislation to arrest and jail rioters.  But he is one of few.  In all the other areas of the country the cities are devolving into lawless free-fire zones.  The woke black lesbian mayor of Chicago, Lori Lightfoot, who let the BLM riots devastate her city, even she has finally balked at the level of lawlessness that the even crazier black woman state’s attorney, Kimberly Foxx has unleashed on the city.  Foxx refused to prosecute gangs involved in a murderous shootout.  Her reason, because it was a mutually engaged in fight.  So, no charges, not even littering for filling the streets with spent bullet cartridges.  Gang war is now just part of daily life in Chicago.  Basically, that is a return to the situation when Al Capone ran whiskey back in the 1920’s.

A friend of mine is convinced that this whole approach is a ploy to allow the police to be federalized.  Maybe he’s right.  But whatever the deeper motives may be there is no doubt that the destruction of law and order will lead to dire consequences.  An obvious one is that the urban areas will become violent hellholes that all normal people will flee.  But these areas will be centers from which the criminal gangs that inhabit them will range out to commit all manner of crime against the surrounding suburban and even rural areas.  And that will be where the conflict will probably be resolved.  Eventually the states will either have to step in and rein in this organized crime or vigilantism will become the policing of last resort.

Maybe the vigilantes will brand their organization White Lives Matter.  It sounds like a concept whose time has come.

BLM Warns NYC “Don’t Try to Stop Crime”

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BLM crime lord Hawk Newsome warned incoming NYC mayor Eric Adams that if he attempts to rein in crime BLM will riot and burn the city to the ground.

“A Black Lives Matter leader vowed there’ll be “riots,” “fire” and “bloodshed” if Mayor-elect Eric Adams follows through with his promise to bring back plainclothes anti-crime cops to battle New York’s surge in violent crimes.”

It’s wonderful to have such clarity.  The vampires announce that if they aren’t allowed to suck the life out of the peasants they’ll burn down the city and massacre the peasants.  Such honesty must be applauded.

Brilliant Leftist Journalists Reveal What’s Wrong with Dying Leftist Cities – Too Many Police!

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In this pair of articles,

Minneapolis Is About to Vote on Whether to Dismantle the Police

The Past 2 Years Have Left Portland Reeling. What Kind of Recovery Comes Next?

written by leftist loons, we are educated by the authors on how it’s not the fifteen months of riots, murder, arson and robbery that have made their cities hellholes that tourists avoid and residents flee for safer places.  It’s actually the police that are the problem.  And remember these two cities, Portland and Minneapolis are governed by the most anti-police city governments in America.  Both cities are actively working to dismantle their police departments.  So effectively there is no policing going on in either city.  The police, such as they are, barely make their presence known.  They wait until the crimes have occurred and show up to record the details for police reports that can be used by the victims for insurance purposes and to direct the ambulance or morgue truck to the bodies, living or dead.  But the articles are clear that it is systemic racism that is killing these cities.  Although the Portland article is clear in telling us that Portland is safe and vibrant.  It’s only prejudice and racism that is spreading the false impression that the city is a dirty, abandoned shell of its former self, filled with homeless encampments and homicidal drug addicts.

These articles are very long so you might want to skim them.  Better advice is just skip them.  I’ve done the public service of reading this crap for you.  I think the take away I got from these articles is that even in the leftist bastions of Portland and Minneapolis it is getting difficult to sell people on the “defund the police” narrative.  They try, they really try.  We get thousands of words about policing being slave control and Jim Crow and blah, blah, blah.  But I think they’re trying to sell all this to people who just want their lives to go back to normal.  And not just white people.  Minneapolis has become very dangerous.  And that has been noticed by the black neighborhoods.  The change impacts everyone.  The white neighborhoods have seen an enormous increase in property crime but also things like carjackings.  But it’s in the black neighborhoods where things have gotten out of hand.  So, it will take a lot of talking in circles to convince the black population in Minnesota that they really want to get rid of the police.

Portland is one of the whitest big cities in America.  Their problem is the enormous homeless population.  Druggies come from far and wide to live in a place that reflects their values.  When there was a working police force, it could be kept under control.  Now that’s gone.  So, you have antifa and BLM rioting, the homeless defecating in the streets and addicts robbing you at knifepoint but Portland wants people to think it’s a “vibrant” and safe place to visit and live.  It turns out that’s a hard sell.

It will be interesting to me to see if these two cities are able to convince their residents to get rid of their police.  Maybe they can.  Leftists are very good at ignoring reality.  Maybe they can make it happen.  But if they do, I’d guess that the size of these cities will shrink way down.  Most people want to live in a place where they are safe.  And this goes double for families.  It takes a really hard-core leftist to be willing to let her kids be victims of street crime to prove a point.  But the writers of these articles sound like they just might be crazy enough to try.  It does indeed take all kinds.

So good luck to you folks in Portland, Minneapolis and of course Chicago and New York.  You’ve made your bed and now you get to sleep in it.  Enjoy.

Is the Left Ready for Civil War?

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I used to think that the Left was in over their heads and were letting themselves be panicked into allowing their crazier allies run wild during the Trump administration in order to discredit him.  I’m no longer sure.  I’ve been thinking about whether maybe they want to push this thing to martial law and go all the way to a permanent coup.

They keep using the FBI to criminalize dissent and they are now unphased by the permanent anarchy in places like Portland and Chicago.  Maybe they intend to harass normal people endlessly until in desperation they turn to force to protect themselves and use this as an excuse to declare martial law.  I hadn’t considered this seriously before but now I did.  After all, even a half-assed US military is equipped with weapons that no private group or even a state militia could deal with.  Drones and tanks and attack helicopters don’t have to be controlled by the best and brightest to win the day.  I know this sound like lunacy but I would have said that about locking down the planet to deal with a bioweapon that when looked at objectively doesn’t exactly look like an extinction event.

Well, maybe it’s true.  Maybe they’d like to provoke a serious reaction.  They keep trying to gin up a militia attack on themselves.  They let antifa and BLM torture normal people at every turn.  It’s a cinch they want to use these things to go after gun rights and tighten the surveillance state powers they already have.

For the sake of argument let’s say that they’ve calculated the results of a martial law takeover and are now willing to change the government into a permanent autocracy and forego the charade of elections.  Should that make us change the way we act?  Should we be walking on eggshells to avoid giving them an excuse?  I don’t think so.

My way of thinking about it is that if they did decide to take over, they could easily manufacture whatever kind of incident they think they need to do it.  With complete control of all communications and the press they already can tell whatever story they want to.  In fact, they already do.  So, I don’t think they need any help.

But after a little thought I’ve decided they won’t do it.  But neither is this a panicky accident.  I think the threat is what they want to use.  They’ll attack individuals and they will use lawfare and they will ratchet up the controls to almost any lengths short of actually declaring a coup.  I think intimidation and psyops are what they think are their strong suit.  And with the antifa and BLM benefitting from selective enforcement of the law the damage they can do to their enemies is pretty impressive.

So, I don’t think the Left is prepared for war.  I think they know that if the armed forces were seen to be unleashed against the civilian population it would have a delegitimizing effect on their regime both nationally and internationally.  As it is Joe Biden has become a figure of ridicule.  The chants at football games and the general mockery he is receiving by anyone not completely in the tank for the Dems shows that the credibility of his administration has already been eroded.  It won’t take many more failures to convince the majority of Americans that his regime is a failure.

So, if the Left has a policy of rattling sabers but stopping short of actual war what should our policy be?  Well, I guess that depends on what we are trying to do.  If we still have a hope of regaining control of the federal government then the plan is to disassemble the deep state.  Fire an enormous percentage of the management of the intelligence bureaus and start pulling back their authority to intimidate Americans.

If we don’t have hope of getting the federal government back under control, we will need to start building up the autonomy and strength of the red states and coordinate their actions to resist tyrannical actions by the federal government.

Richest Man In Illinois Says Chicago Resembles Afghanistan

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Ken Griffin is a hedge fund manager and he is thinking of getting his company out of Chicago.

“Billionaire Ken Griffin, founder and CEO of the hedge fund Citadel, hinted Monday that he might move his company’s headquarters from Chicago, saying the crime makes the city more akin to a war-torn country.

“It’s becoming ever more difficult to have this as our global headquarters, a city which has so much violence,” Griffin said. “I mean Chicago is like Afghanistan, on a good day, and that’s a problem.”

Griffin said he personally saw “25 bullet shots in the glass window of the retail space” in the building he lives in, adding that someone “tried to carjack the security detail” that sits outside his house.”

My favorite quotes,

“It just tells you like how deep crime runs in this city,” Griffin said. “There is nowhere, where you can feel safe today walking home at 9:30 at night and you worry about your kids coming to and from school.”  “That’s no way for our city to exist,” Griffin said.

The perception of crime has started making it difficult to recruit talent to Citadel’s Chicago campus, he said, and he can’t in good faith tell people the city is a good place to raise a family anymore.

Griffin didn’t say where he might consider moving his global headquarters to, but he was asked if New York City could serve as an “antidote to the dysfunction” of Chicago.  “You guys need some new medicine, too, because some of the same problems that we have faced is now unfolding in New York,” Griffin said. “The path New York is on is a scary path.”

It’s about time that these cloud people got their heads wrapped around what they’ve signed on for.  What did they think would happen when they bent the knee to BLM and allowed the police to be vilified?  Maybe if it were their children being terrified at school and their businesses being burned out they might not be so matter of fact about unleashing antifa on us.  Too bad a few of those bullets didn’t come a little closer to his face.

Greetings to September Thirtieth, Anno Domini MMXXI

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Another beautiful, if chilly morning here in the land of Wokish Puritans.  I have done my due diligence and looked over the headlines.  What I see is that both the Left and the Right see Joe Biden as a disaster, but for different reasons.  The Left sees him as a doddering idiot who keeps tripping over his own feet and fouling up the beautiful set-up he was handed by the Deep State and friends.  The Right sees him as a doddering idiot who keeps tripping over his own feet as he presides over the dismantling of what is left of the “land of the free and the home of the brave.”

Joe’s approval rating is under water but so what?  Will that change anything?  I guess the hope is that if Biden is construed as a failed president, then maybe Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema will refuse to sign onto the 3.5 trillion Dollar reconciliation bill and we might be spared the illegal alien amnesty bill and whatever other atrocities Pelosi and Schumer have teed up for us.  I guess we’re about to find out.  I seriously doubt we’re going to get lucky.  The Dems sense they have a short window before the 2022 primary season and will be going for broke this fall.  But who knows?  Miracles have happened.

But I guess it’s at least amusing to watch the consensus grow across Left and Right that Dementia Joe is a creepy loser who’s in way over his head.  I suspect history will be particularly cruel to Biden and Harris.  But I need to remind myself that history is written by the winners and even without an effective White House the Left has an overwhelmingly strong hand to play.

In other news there were a bunch of in-depth reports discovering again that if you remove the police from a city like Minneapolis then the black neighborhoods will descend into crime, drug addiction and murder.  Children will be killed during gun play between the gang bangers, white people will flee the city in droves and the loss of revenues will cause the problem to spiral out of control.  The only differences in these reports depend on the ideological stripe of the writer.  The lefties decry the violence but claim that the police cannot use the tactics previously available to them.  In other words, they want magical police.  The writers on the right notice that nobody is lining up to take the vacant police jobs currently available and conclude that runaway crime in Minneapolis will be an ongoing phenomenon for the foreseeable future.

Well, my answer to all this is, don’t complain when you get what you say you wanted.  The progressives and their followers in Minneapolis put the city in the hands of ideologues that allowed and even encouraged a mob of antifa and BLM rioters to burn down a police precinct while looting and burning their neighbors’ businesses and assaulting and even killing some of these same people.  I take no pleasure in seeing poor people living in a hellscape where law and order have been eliminated.  But there is no other way for these imbeciles to learn just how delusional their viewpoint on urban policing really is.  Once all the affluent white progressives move away from their dangerous Minneapolis homes the people who are left can begin to figure out how to deal with reality.  The only shame is that these progressives won’t have a chance to see their own homes and businesses looted and burned.  That would be too much to ask.

I saw a couple of reports about the upcoming Supreme Court docket.  There are a bunch of important cases that have impact on our sorely mistreated constitutional rights.  And for once I’m slightly optimistic that some good things may happen in this session.  And if the decisions occur late enough in the year it may be too late for the Democrats to pack the Court.  It’s assumed they will lose the House in 2022 and that would curtail at least temporarily their ability to change the Court’s size.  If the new justices continue to buck John Robert’s liberal agenda, we could see some honest judicial decisions that would have a positive effect on our lives.  It’s at least worth watching and I’ll be interested to see which way they go.  I don’t want to be too much of a pessimist.  Even I get bored of that.

So that’s what’s in the news.  In my own world I’ve been busy with writing and repairing all the stuff that breaks down around here.  Carpentry, plumbing, auto repairs and landscaping are high on the list of stuff that needs doing.  Luckily the auto repair is covered by an insurance policy so I’ll leave that to the professionals.  I guess I’ll take a first stab at the others but something tells me the plumber will be getting a call soon.  Ah, who am I kidding?  I better get a carpenter too.

But it’s a good day and I feel cheerful.  Camera Girl is making delicious soups and I’m dedicated to watching the world collapse into a heap of stress fractured fragments.  There is an ancient legacy in my family around bartering in rubble and scraps.  I think my ancestors in the Fifth Century probably sold off the marble that originally covered the Colosseum to Visigoth chieftains to adorn their medieval castles.  It’s a cinch I’ll flourish amid the ruins of Biden’s America.  There will be plenty of rubble to barter.

Of Dinosaurs and Decline

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I have a young grandson who is fascinated by dinosaurs.  I told him that if the rioting in New York City subsides I’d like to bring him to the American Museum of Natural History and let him see their dinosaur collection.  And that got me thinking.

As I’ve mentioned previously a culture needs its myths.  In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the center of the American Myth was New York City.  The rich and powerful built a modern-day Rome.  Monumental buildings and cultural centers were built and artefacts and art works were collected from around the world.  Even an enormous garden called Central Park was built in the center of the island, the most expensive real estate in the world, to provide an oasis from the concrete jungle that was built to house the business hub of a modern empire.

And from my point of view, the crown jewel was the American Museum of Natural History.  The Museum was essentially free to residents of New York City.  You were allowed to pay any amount you wanted for admission even a penny.  Out in front was a larger-than-life sculpture of Teddy Roosevelt on a horse with African and Indian bearers escorting him on one of his expeditions.  And inside was assembled a spectacular collection of natural history specimens that would fuel the imagination of anyone with a speck of imagination or curiosity.

There were magnificent dinosaur skeletons.  Specimens of Tyrannosaurus rex, Allosaurus, Brontosaurus (now renamed Apatosaurus to satisfy the boring needs of pedagogy), Triceratops, Stegosaurus and Duck-billed dinosaurs called Edmontosaurus annectens are on display in spacious halls that allow the spectators to walk around these marvels.  In addition to the dinosaurs there are skeletons of wooly mammoths, mastodons, wooly rhinoceros, giant ground sloths and other prehistoric mammals.  There are also halls filled with the preserved bodies of mammals and birds from Africa, Asia and the Americas displayed in dioramas that used painted backgrounds and other materials like native vegetation to simulate the animals in their native habitat.  Scenes of lions, rhinos, tigers and elephants provide remarkable vistas.  Other halls include collections of gemstones, artefacts of aboriginal peoples from six continents and even a life size model of a blue whale are on display.

The museum with its heroic statue of Roosevelt is itself an artefact of a civilization at its peak of wealth, strength and confidence.  Everything fits into the myth of American, and by extension, Western civilization expanding and illuminating the world.  We gathered these specimens from the four corners of the Earth and we had studied and determined their meaning.  We were the masters of the planet and we were confidently stepping into the future.  There was even a planetarium that would teach our children of their place in the universe and our eventual explorations beyond Earth.

So, in 2021 the statue of Teddy Roosevelt was removed from the entrance of the museum.  Soon I’m sure that roving bands of BLM rioters will loot the museum and sell the dinosaur bones to crack cocaine dealers as trophy crack pipes.  Our myth about Teddy Roosevelt as the great white hunter is no different than Rome’s Julius Caesar and the Huns’ Atilla.  Not everything in the myth is true but the myth fits the needs of a people.  When you give up your myths it means you’ve given up on your reason to live as a people.  That’s what we’re seeing.

Maybe I should bring my grandson to see the Beijing Museum of Natural History’s dinosaur collection.  It would probably be safer and less depressing.

A Republican Governor Does something Right and Smart – American Greatness Post of the Day

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“Missouri Governor Mike Parson (R-Mo.) issued a pardon for the St. Louis couple ( Mark and Patricia McCloskey) that successfully defended their home from far-left terrorists last year, after local prosecutors had sought to charge them with a crime.  Parson is showing some real smarts here.  Encourage the people who vote for you and stick a thumb in the eye of those who are attacking your people.  Now go further and clean up the BLM activity in St. Louis and he’ll be thought of as a real leader.

I read that Mark McCloskey is thinking of running for the Senate seat that GOP Senator Roy Blount is vacating next year.  Of course, I don’t know much about McCloskey other than his choice in firearms and his desire not to let a mob burn down his house but that might be enough to get him a senate seat in these times of BLM mob intimidation.  Sounds like a feel good story to me.