RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/12/flash_mobs_.html

“We need to be shocked by a generation’s bold descent into anomy. When absence of conscience becomes commonplace, when sociopaths loiter around every corner and patrol every sidewalk, and when the fruits of a liberal society fall largely to those who least appreciate the origins and purposes of our freedoms, then promises of life, liberty, and happiness for all are in jeopardy, and democracy itself is at stake.”

The facile assembly of large mobs of miscreants to raid retailers in San Francisco, Oakland, and Los Angeles is even more alarming than it seems.

The events are novel and even a bit entertaining, posing only a minor challenge to law enforcement if police are permitted to intercede.

More important than the incidents per se, however, is what they may reveal about the participants.

Lootings have been widely reported, mainly on the West Coast.  At Union Square in the heart of San Francisco:

“At least 40 thieves allegedly broke into a Louis Vuitton store on Friday [November 26], grabbing whatever they could before loading it into a series of cars parked curbside out front. The shoplifting caravan cut a swath through San Francisco’s high-end boutiques, creating a scene of chaos while stealing more than $1 million in merchandise.”

The New York Post described the another event, in Oakland, California:

“Hey, look — here are 80 people engaged in a large-scale smash-and-grab robbery of a Nordstrom in Walnut Creek outside San Francisco last weekend, one of a series of jaw-dropping thefts over the last several days, including an operation that cleared out a Louis Vuitton on San Francisco’s Union Square.”

Another Oakland location had  two similar lootings:

 “Prime 365 says more than 30 burglars ran through their store.

“In [a] video, you can see a long line of people rushing in, and in one instance, even pushing each other out of the way to grab hats off a shelf.”

Although the signature of these attacks is the large number of offenders, several robberies have involved, in each instance, only a handful of perpetrators (perps). Press accounts do not distinguish assaults with dozens of offenders from those with only a few, using the same terms – “flash mobs” and “smash and grab,”” for both.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/12/buttigiegs-ambitions-have-always-been-detached-his-daniel-greenfield/

Everyone knows someone who was touted as bright, an achiever, and most likely to succeed… not because they actually ever did anything, but because that was their image.

That’s Buttigieg in a nutshell.

Some politicians build cults of personality around them. Buttigieg is one of those honor students who makes his ambition seem like aspiration, entirely apart from anything they’ve actually accomplished. You weren’t supposed to ask what Obama had actually done to deserve the Senate and the White House. Likewise, you’re not supposed to look at Buttigieg’s actual record.

Buttigieg is currently being touted as the Dem candidate in 2024 even while the supply chain crisis that he’s supposed to be addressing is wrecking the economy.

It’s a strange mismatch between the headlines that could have been written by his PAC and the reporting on the actual consequences of the DOT’s inaction and incompetence on his watch.

But that was always the case. 

When I visited South Bend, it was a disaster, but the media’s one story about the place was how Buttigieg had brought “hope” to it. His presidential run was accompanied by virtually no scrutiny about his time there, aside from a police shooting of a black man.

Buttigieg’s disastrous mismanagement of South Bend and now the DOT has never impeded his political ambitions. Like Obama, he insists that he should be judged by his aspirations, not by his accomplishments.

Americans, like the residents of South Bend, are already paying the price for Buttigieg’s ambition and incompetence. 

https://blacklivesmatter.com/black-xmas/

Black Xmas

As we prepare ourselves for the holiday season, we are bombarded with ads that seek to whip us up into a consumerist frenzy. Black Friday sales are being rolled out weeks in advance of Thanksgiving and, at every turn, white-supremacist-capitalism is telling us to spend our money on things that we don’t need, to reap profits for corporations.

As BLMLA organizer, Jan Williams, reminds us, “Capitalism doesn’t love Black people.” In fact, white-supremacist-capitalism invented policing, initially as chattel-slavery-era “paddy rollers,” in order to protect its interests and put targets on the backs of Black people. Under modern-day policing, those targets have been affixed to the backs of Black people like, #JohnCrawford and #StevenTaylor, who were murdered by police inside Walmart stores; like #YuvetteHenderson and #RedelJones, Black mothers who were accused of petty thefts before their lives were stolen by police; and like #AlbertRamonDorsey and #DennisToddRogers, who were gunned down when 24-Hour-Fitness locations called in police on Black male patrons…twice.

Beginning in 2014, in response to John Crawford’s murder by police in Beavercreek, Ohio, Black Lives Matter has been challenging people to “dream of a #BlackXmas,” to intentionally use our economic resources to disrupt white-supremacist-capitalism and build Black community:

#BuildBlack: Invest in Black-led, Black-serving organizations by making donations in the names of your loved ones as holiday gifts.
#BuyBlack: When buying items, spend exclusively with Black-owned businesses from Black Friday through New Year.
#BankBlack: Move your money from white corporate banks (that finance gentrification, prisons, and environmental degradation) to Black-owned ones.

Wondering where to start? Resources are available at blackxmas.org.

We’re also taking your suggestions! Have a Black organization, business, or bank we should profile? Let us know! You can also demonstrate your support by changing your social media profile picture to the #BlackXmas graphic:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-spreads-faster-than-covid-19-vaccination-distribution-breakthrough-infection-omicron-11638570230?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

It deserves a wow. Some 57% of the human population has received at least one dose of the Covid-19 vaccine, and 45% are fully vaccinated, in less than a year.

This means the vaccine has spread approximately twice as fast as the virus, never mind that the virus itself is an exceptionally fast spreader that organizes its own distribution without help from trained administrators and sub-zero storage.

Add that infection also offers a kind of vaccination, so now two kinds of resistance to Covid-19 have been spreading with unprecedented rapidity through the human population.

Numerous were the complaints about how Delta spoiled the summer even for vaccinated people, but it’s not clear why this was so. Vaccination takes away Covid’s deadliest property, its novelty to the human immune system, turning it into the equivalent of a cold or flu. Nobody lets the prospect of a cold or flu spoil their holiday (though perhaps they should for the sake of their elderly in-laws).

The point is not frivolous. It suggests why, rather than a dark new chapter, the Omicron variant may be our last big wallow in hysteria, from which we will awake slightly red-faced in the morning.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/john-eastman-right-resist-january-6-committee/

The name of the game Congress is playing with its partisan inquisition is intimidation. John Eastman is right to resist. Every American who cares about our Constitutional rights should support him.

John Eastman, a former member of Donald Trump’s legal team, has just declined, through his attorney, to cooperate with the congressional inquiry into the events of January 6, 2021 at the Capitol.

I think he was right to do so, for several reasons.

In the first place, the congressional inquiry would be better named a congressional vendetta. Its composition is heavily weighted towards Democrats. The committee includes no “ranking members” of the opposition as the rules stipulate, hence the frequent invocation of the “Star Chamber” in descriptions of the inquiry. It is less an investigation than an inquisition.

Given the frankly biased structure of the congressional panel, Eastman, like Steve Bannon before him, was right to decline to testify or provide documents to aid in his own prosecution.

For readers who are a little fuzzy about just who John Eastman is, the relevant fact is that (apart from being a brilliant constitutional lawyer at the storied Claremont Institute), Eastman wrote the now infamous memo, originally a two-pager, later expanded to six pages, in December 2020 outlining various strategies that team Trump might consider in response to the 2020 election.

It is not, as widely reported, a scheme to “overturn” the election. It is an effort to layout various ways in which an election that was widely seen to be corrupt could be lawfully challenged.

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/womens-tennis-has-balls-does-wall

China is ruled by an increasingly totalitarian regime that uses technology to spy on its citizens. It is, at this moment, carrying out a genocide against its Uyghur Muslim population. It regularly vanishes people who dare to dissent. And it wants to control the terms of debate, politics and business worldwide.

Having disappeared doctors and scientists who tried to blow the whistle on Covid-19, the Chinese Communist Party has now targeted Peng Shuai, a tennis star who accused a former top Chinese government official of sexual assault. “Even if it is like an egg hitting a rock, or if I am like a moth drawn to the flame, inviting self-destruction, I will tell the truth about you,” she wrote on the social media platform Weibo. Then her message disappeared. And so did she.

These are facts discoverable to any American with an internet connection, which the hedge fund investor Ray Dalio surely has in his Greenwich, Connecticut, mansion.

Smart guy, one imagines, to be trusted with managing $150 billion of other people’s money, as his company Bridgewater does. But when Dalio was asked yesterday on CNBC about China’s human rights record, and how he thinks about it with regard to his investments, he feigned ignorance.

“I can’t be an expert in those types of things,” he told interviewer Andrew Ross Sorkin. “I really have no idea.” He went on to compare China’s government to that of a strict parent, and offered some mush of moral relativism about how the United States does bad things, too. This from a man who wrote a book called “Principles.”

You really should watch the whole thing: