RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wbez.org/stories/winning-has-come-through-revolts-a-black-lives-matter-activist-on-why-she-supports-looting/398d0f3f-73d0-4f2e-ae32-04cceba0d322

The Sunday afternoon shooting by police of Latrell Allen, 20, in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood led to a standoff in that community between residents and officers. By evening the tension had eased, but overnight and into the early morning hours Monday, looters hit Chicago’s wealthiest shopping district on North Michigan Avenue.

Looting earlier this summer grew out of large protest marches downtown. This most recent looting was different, and it’s exact genesis remains unclear. Mayor Lori Lightfoot said,“This is not legitimate First Amendment-protected speech. … This was straight-up felony, criminal conduct,” but some activists disagree. WBEZ talked with Black Lives Matter organizer Ariel Atkins on why she supports people looting and looting as protest.

What’s your take on the police shooting in Englewood and the subsequent looting downtown?

Ariel Atkins: A lot of people are really attacking our pages. They’re like, ‘Oh, you support the looters.’ And yeah, we do, 100%. That’s reparations. And like however people choose to protest, especially if it was definitely in line with what happened with the shooting, which would be powerful to see people reacting … without organizers just being like, ‘We’re angry and this is what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna take the power back.’

I feel like these stores, these Macy’s, these Guccis, the PNC Banks, they’re not here for us. The city puts way more money and investment into spending time and protecting their spaces and making sure that they exist. And yet our people are constantly being pushed out of the city. … Unemployment is incredibly high, like we are in an incredible situation, and the fact that anybody gives a s*** about these businesses over what is happening in this city right now and the pain that people are in and the suffering that is taking place, I don’t care. I will support the looters ‘till the end of the day. If that’s what they need to do in order to eat, then that’s what you’ve got to do to eat.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/08/18/against-black-lives-matter/

Although they operate under the banner of social justice, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and its allies are a pernicious force. The false narratives, the toleration of lawlessness, and the punishment of dissenters have left our society in disarray. Americans of all races and political stripes should reject these tactics.

The problems with BLM start with its false claim that white police and civilians are systematically killing black people. Allied media have promoted cases that seem to fit this narrative, such as the deaths of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery, but the outrage is selective. In a country as large as the United States, reporters can find individual incidents to support just about any narrative they want.

The statistics on race and crime tell a very different story than the one advanced by the anecdotes favored by the media. First, black Americans are far more likely than non-blacks to commit violent crime. Blacks accounted for 37 percent of all arrests for violent crime in 2018, including 53 percent of murder arrests, despite constituting only 13 percent of the population. It is this fundamental disparity in base rates of crime that generates so many encounters between blacks and police in the first place. Once we adjust for base rates, police are less likely to fatally shoot black suspects compared to white suspects—a fact that is entirely at odds with the BLM narrative.

Even the evidence that police may be rougher with (but not more likely to kill) black suspects needs to be viewed in the context of base rates. While we should welcome any reforms that will make law enforcement more fair and effective, police cannot be blamed for noticing that some groups tend to be more dangerous than others. Black men are 6 percent of the population but have perpetrated 42 percent of cop killings over the past decade. That fact is surely relevant when police are required to make threat assessments with limited information.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/08/trump-russia-investigation-will-kevin-clinesmith-plead-guilty/

He has a lot to lose.

It is called the allocution. It is the most important part of a guilty plea in federal court. It comes — if it comes — when the judge personally addresses the accused, who has been placed under oath, and asks him to explain in his own words how and why he is guilty of the crime charged.

Is Kevin Clinesmith willing to allocute? Is he willing to admit without reservation that he deceived his FBI colleagues and a federal court? The lack of clear answers to those questions is almost certainly the sticking point — the reason why, to this moment, there is only a false-statement charge against the former Bureau lawyer, not a false-statement guilty plea.

When it comes time to allocute, the court must ensure that the accused acknowledges committing the acts alleged and, just as significantly, doing so with the level of criminal intent prescribed in the relevant penal statute — the mens rea of the crime. If the accused does not admit guilt, and evince that he is doing so voluntarily and in full awareness of the possible consequences, then the judge should not accept the guilty plea.

After all, such a plea involves a waiver of constitutional and statutory rights — to due process, to putting the prosecution to its burden of proving all elements of the charge beyond a reasonable doubt at trial, to appeal. The plea further subjects the accused to potential imprisonment and significant fines; and the allocution itself could subject the accused to further prosecution for perjury if he lies while under oath.

https://acdemocracy.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Screen-Shot-2020-08-18-at-2.05.21-PM.png

Black Lives Matter, Israel & Intersectionality 

Since the founding of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in 2013, the delegitimization (DLG) network against Israel and its activists have embarked on a propaganda campaign that draws parallels between police violence in the US against African Americans and violence against Palestinians by the Israel Police and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). This fictitious parallel is part of a strategic attempt by the delegitimization network to entrench itself and the BDS movement as a focal point of the progressive movement.Intersectionality posits that no form of discrimination is distinct from another. This includes discrimination that emanates from capitalism, white supremacy, government, prison and justice systems, the police force, colonialism, gender hetero-normativity, and other institutionalized norms.

After the killing of George Floyd, DLG activists immediately began drawing comparisons with what they describe as systematic and deadly Israeli brutality against Palestinians. The comparisons were given further impetus in the wake of the May 30th killing of Iyad Halak, an autistic Palestinian from East Jerusalem, by Israeli police in Jerusalem’s Old City. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/16/health/coronavirus-immunity-antibodies.html?surface=home-discovery-vi-prg&fellback=

Disease-fighting antibodies and special immune cells appear to persist months after coronavirus infections have resolved, new research shows.

“This is exactly what you would hope for,” said Marion Pepper, an immunologist at the University of Washington and an author on another of the new studies, which is currently under review at the journal Nature. “All the pieces are there to have a totally protective immune response.”

Protection against reinfection cannot be fully confirmed until there is proof that most people who encounter the virus a second time are actually able to keep it at bay, Dr. Pepper said. But the findings could help quell recent concerns over the virus’s ability to dupe the immune system into amnesia, leaving people vulnerable to repeat bouts of disease.

Researchers have yet to find unambiguous evidence that coronavirus reinfections are occurring, especially within the few months that the virus has been rippling through the human population. The prospect of immune memory “helps to explain that,” Dr. Pepper said.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/trump-posthumously-pardons-susan-b-anthony/

President Trump said Tuesday that he will grant a posthumous pardon to Susan B. Anthony, one of the major figures of the women’s suffrage movement.

The president’s announcement came on the 100th anniversary of the ratification in 1920 of the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote.

“I will be signing a full and complete pardon of Susan B. Anthony. She was never pardoned,” Trump said at the White House Tuesday morning.

The women’s rights activist was arrested in 1872 for voting as a woman in Rochester, New York and was later convicted. Several years later, in 1878, the amendment giving women the right to vote was presented to Congress thanks to Anthony’s efforts.

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She was also active against slavery and collected anti-slavery petitions while still a teenager.

Anthony died in 1906.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/08/18/will_the_dam_break_after_clines

News reports have downplayed the significance of former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith’s guilty plea, acknowledging he altered an official document in the government’s Trump-Russia collusion probe. There has been some coverage, mainly because it is so rare to see FBI agents charged with a felony and because it is the first tangible result of U.S. Attorney John Durham’s sprawling investigation of the investigators. But mainstream news outlets have minimized its importance. It’s only one count, they say, and it deals with a relatively minor crime by a mid-level figure.

That’s spin, and it’s wrong. This plea is like finding water seeping from the base of a dam. The problem is not one muddy puddle. The problem is that it foreshadows the dam’s failure, releasing a torrent. That’s what the Clinesmith plea portends.

What Did Clinesmith Admit?

Clinesmith acknowledges he altered an email from the CIA to the FBI, answering a question about Carter Page. Page is an American citizen and a Naval Academy graduate who spent considerable time in Russia. His time abroad raised a question for the FBI’s counter-intelligence division. Was Page a Russian agent? Or was he on our side, helping the U.S. gather intelligence about the Kremlin? The CIA would know.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2020/08/17/seattle-defunded-police-now-businesses-are-leaving-and-rioters-still-aim-explosives-at-cops-n799570

Last week, the Seattle City Council voted to slash funding for the police department, leading the city’s first black female police chief to resign. The council defunded the police even after antifa rioters had wreaked havoc on the city in the name of racial justice. In one particularly memorable case, rioters used a van loaded with explosives to blow open a police station. On Sunday, rioters fired explosives at police, wounding at least three of them. Some businesses in the city have had enough.

“What [the] city council has done has been more detrimental to our business than a global pandemic, by far, absolutely,” Joe Raetzer, co-owner of Steepologie Teas with his wife Andrea, told the Fox affiliate Q13 last week. His wife said there are “only so many times you can hire people and lay them off because they don’t want to be in this location, they already didn’t feel safe pre-COVID, pre-riots.”

Steepologie Teas boasted more than 300 loose-leaf teas on 4th Avenue. Seattle Apartments Magazine rated the tea shop “hands down the best tea in Seattle.” Now, the tea store has closed down permanently.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/08/blm-race-hustlers-make-louisville-businesses-offer-richard-l-cravatts/

When businesses in the NuLu district of Louisville were aggressively approached by Black Lives Matter activists last week, it raised the thorny issue of who benefits when older neighborhoods are revitalized and made more attractive by the creation of new housing and retail businesses. In this process, when older areas begin to be seen as desirable neighborhoods whose desirable locations, rich social fabric, ethnic mix, and accessibility make them attractive to new residents and the upwardly mobile, local activists start their predictable protests against development, displacement, and, worst of all, what they perceive as the dreaded gentrification that defines these older neighborhoods’ current state.

Contending that “The policies and processes of the revitalization of NuLu has [sic] displaced marginalized people from homes their families have often resided for generations, single-handedly progressing the gentrification of Black neighborhoods,” BLM protestors distributed a list of “Occupy NuLu Demands” to businesses “to express the destruction your business has caused to low-income communities, specifically those with majority Black residents.”

Referring to the economic and social rebirth of an entire neighborhood, benefiting rich and poor alike—as a “destruction” of a low-income community, of course, seems to be counter-intuitive, since most municipalities welcome upgrading of their urban cores, particularly when it eliminates pockets of poverty, widens the tax base, creates new housing, reduces crime, and stimulates the overall investment in the locality by housing developers and retail businesses—precisely what has occurred in NuLu.