Civil unrest

20 Shot Overnight In Chicago: “I’m Scared To Walk To The Corner Store”

Posted by Lou on August 12, 2018
Posted in: Civil unrest, Crime, Criminology, Gun control, Law enforcement, Urban warfare, Violence. Leave a comment

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Chicago gun violence erupted to start this weekend, leaving two people dead and at least 18 others severely wounded, including a woman killed in a brutal domestic dispute. It follows last weekend’s record for violent crime, when 12 people were killed and 74 shot.

Some have linked the increased aggression among residents to relentless scorching hot temperatures this summer, and Chicago has been ground zero for inner city aggression in 2018. According to NBC Chicago, the most recent incident occurred Saturday morning in the Lawndale neighborhood on the West Side. A 25-year-old man was wounded in a shooting at about 1:55 a.m. in the 4000 block of West Grenshaw.

Law enforcement officials said he was standing outside when two people began firing shots that struck the man. First responders rushed him to St. Anthony’s Hospital with gunshot wounds to the buttocks and the groin, with the hospital now listing him in fair condition.

About 4:45 p.m. Friday, a 29-year-old woman involved in a domestic dispute with someone in the 2500 block of East 79th Street was killed, Chicago police said. The woman, who had a pending court order against the shooter, suffered a fatal gunshot to her back, police said.

Genice Hines, the mother of the 15-year-old, told the Chicago Tribune it felt like any other Friday night, until late evening when she left work and received a terrifying call. Her son and nephew, two close friends, had been shot. The boys were both standing at the 1300 block of South Independence Boulevard in the West Side’s Lawndale neighborhood when they heard gunfire. Reports indicated the children were about a block from the gas station at Roosevelt Road and Independence.

The 15-year-old was shot in the head, and the 17-year-old was shot in the abdomen. First responders took them both to Mount Sinai Hospital where they were both listed in good condition.

“Chicago is a scary place to be,” Hines warned. “Even I’m scared to walk to the corner store.”

The boys were among 20 people shot in the past 48 hours. NBC Chicago provides the list of shootings:

  • about midnight, a man was wounded after he was shot somewhere on his body in the Austin neighborhood on the West Side;
  • a 17-year-old girl was struck in the left shoulder and lower back while she was standing in the kitchen of a home about 2:10 a.m. in the South Side Chatham neighborhood;
  • about 9:15 a.m., two men and a 12-year-old girl were wounded in a drive-by shooting Friday morning in the Gresham neighborhood on the South Side. The three victims conditions were stabilized at area hospitals;
  • about 11:45 a.m., A 25-year-old man was shot in the left calf in a shooting Friday morning in the Gresham neighborhood on the South Side. The mans condition was stabilized at Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn;
  • about 3:20 p.m., a 28-year-old man was sitting on a porch in the 5100 block of South Prairie Avenue when a dark-colored car pulled up and someone inside opened fire, police said. The man was struck in his leg and foot, and was taken to University of Chicago Medical Center, where his condition stabilized;
  • about 5 p.m., a 17-year-old boy was wounded in the abdomen in the 2300 block of North Major. He was taken to Illinois Masonic Medical Center, where he was stabilized;
  • shortly after 5 p.m., a 41-year-old was inside an abandoned building in the 11900 block of South Michigan when he got into a fight with someone he knew, police said. The person he was fighting with pulled out a gun and shot him in the right leg. He was taken to Roseland Community Hospital, where his condition was stabilized;
  • about 6:15 p.m., a 37-year-old man was shot in his leg in the 6400 block of South Martin Luther King Drive. He taken by paramedics to Saint Bernard Hospital, where his condition stabilized;
  • about 7:10 p.m., a 20-year-old bicyclist was seriously wounded after another bicyclist shot him in the West Side Austin neighborhood. He was biking in the 5200 block of West Washington Boulevard when a male following him on a bike opened fire, police said;
  • about 8:50 p.m., Two teenage boys were wounded in a shooting Friday night in the Lawndale neighborhood on the Southwest Side. The boys, ages 15 and 17, were standing on a sidewalk in the 1300 block of South Independence Boulevard when he heard gunshots, police said. The older boy was struck in the abdomen, and the 15-year-old suffered a graze wound to his head. They both took themselves to Mount Sinai Hospital, where they were listed in good condition; and
  • about 10:20 p.m., Two men were wounded in a shooting Friday night in the West Pullman neighborhood on the Far South Side. A 29-year-old was shot in his leg and was taken to Christ Medical Center, where his condition stabilized, police said. A 33-year-old was struck in his foot and was taken to Roseland Community Hospital, where his condition also stabilized.

Some more disturbing statistics about America’s inner city warzone:

So far this year, 318 people have been killed in Chicago. The silver lining: that is 110 fewer than 2017.

Homicides tend to peak in the summer months, on the weekend and during later hours.

The majority of Chicago homicides are the result of gun violence.

Though homicides are recorded throughout the city, they are most concentrated in the South and West sides.

The majority of the victims of homicide in Chicago are young, black men.

Previously Trump had proposed “sending in the Feds” to stabilize the death toll in the “gun free” city.

So far, this remains merely a suggestion.

Paul Craig Roberts: “Is There Enough Of America Left To Be Saved?”

Posted by Lou on August 12, 2018
Posted in: Civil rights, Civil unrest, Corporatocracy, Freedom of speech, Government, Israel, Politics, Religion, Sex, USA. Leave a comment

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Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

As many readers of this website have noticed, the United States has lost its character and become a dysfunctional society. In place of a largely homogeneous population once united in veneration of the Constitution, there exists today massive diversity which Identity Politics has used to disunite the population into separate interest groups.

No clause or article of the Constitution, nor the Bill of Rights, is safe.

The George W. Bush and Obama regimes destroyed two of the most important protections of civil liberty—habeas corpus and due process.

Bush declared indefinite imprisonment on suspicion alone without evidence or trial. Obama declared execution of US citizens on accusation alone without due process. The Justice (sic) Department wrote legal memos justifying torture, thus destroying the constitutional protection against self-incrimination. One of the authors of the memos is now a professor of law at UC Berkeley. The other is now a federal judge, indications that respect for the Constitution and enforcement of US and international laws against torture is fading in law schools and the federal judiciary.

A third important protection of civil liberty – freedom of speech which is necessary for the discovery of truth and to serve justice – is being destroyed. Apple, Google/Facebook, Twitter, Spotify, university speech codes, legislation against protesting Israel’s atrocities against Palestinians, and the presstitute media that has been turned into a propaganda organ in behalf of vested interests are all actively involved in protecting lies against truth.

Glenn Greenwald reported that “the single greatest threat to free speech in the West — and in the U.S. — is the coordinated, growing campaign to outlaw and punish those who advocate for, or participate in, activism to end the Israeli occupation” of Palestine.

The Second Amendment, which was placed in the Constitution as a defense against oppression by government, is under attack by well financed organizations in service to the police state with the intention of disarming the population. Many attentive Americans are convinced that mass shootings are staged or pretended in order to create public support for repealing the Second Amendment. Clearly the amount of effort expended against the Second Amendment is disproportional to the number of shooting deaths as compared to other causes of deaths. Why this one cause of deaths has so many well financed and politically active organizations compared to other causes of deaths is a question that is studiously avoided. We see far more opposition to the Second Amendment than we see against Washington’s destruction in whole or part of seven countries during the past two decades, resulting in the death, maiming, widowing, orphaning and displacement of millions of peoples.

In an Orwellian twist, freedom of religion is now interpreted as a prohibition against celebrating Christianity, the religious basis of the country, in public arenas.

Law faculties and the ACLU have deemphasized the original rights specified in the Constitution, emphasizing instead rights for transgendered, homosexuals, illegal aliens, and those seeking and performing abortions—a horrendous crime only a few decades ago.

Today all it takes to trump the US Constitution is to utter “National Security.”

As the United States is the Constitution, destroying the Constitution destroys the United States. Yet those destroying the Constitution claim that they are making the country safe by substituting police state measures for civil liberty.

The newly invented rights and the speech codes are used as weapons against heterosexual white males and to transfer authority from white male professors and managers to university and corporate “diversity offices” acting in behalf of “oppressed minorities” (women, non-white races except apparently Asians, homosexuals, transgendered). In the August 2018 issue of Chronicles, a magazine of American culture, Jack Trotter relates one of his experiences as an assistant professor “at a major Southern university, one of those SEC football titans.” In a lecture he encouraged his students to “avoid excessive use of abstract, Latinate terms in their writing.” He was accused of committing a racist crime of advocating white superiority by expressing a preference for short words with clear meaning that comprise Anglo-Saxon vocabulary. The absurd charge was placed in Trotter’s university file for internal use in the event he gave further indications of white supremacy by uttering the term Anglo-Saxon.

It gets even more ridiculous than this. A professor I know at a major research university was unaware that “girls” had been made an insensitive word and used it in class. He was called before a diversity dean and told that one more infraction and he would have to attend a class in “diversity training.”

The same thing happened to a graduate student at an English University who was one Friday afternoon sitting talking with three secretaries who were describing the evening out they had planned. He said: “sounds like a fun girls’ night out.” The expression “girls night out” is an old one widely used by women themselves, but the secretaries took offense at the word “girls,” complained, and the graduate student was subjected to sensitivity training.

Any member of an “oppressed minority” can make a complaint against a white male on any basis, and it is in the vested interest of the diversity office, whether university or corporate—remember the Google case—to regard the complaint both as true and as an offense.

A couple of years ago a black female student claimed that as she walked past a fraternity house on the Georgia Tech campus, racial slurs were yelled at her from an open window. The president immediately suspended the fraternity without due process. It was proven that all the windows in the house had been painted shut for many years and that none of them would open. But the penalty against the fraternity stood.

It would be interesting to know if white males are permitted to file complaints against radical feminists who dismiss all white heterosexual males as rapists and black professors who describe whites as “ice people,” racists, and imperial/colonial exploiters.

The question is: are white heterosexual males protected by speech codes? I would suspect that if a white male filed a complaint against a man-hating feminist, the diversity office would take the complaint as proof that the white male is a misogynist, and if a white male filed a complaint against a black it would be interpreted as proof of the white male’s racism.

There have been some cases of Christian students complaining of prejudices that professors display against Christianity, but by and large I don’t think the complaints have had much success.

Liberals will say that the rights protected in the Constitution are more prevalent, not less. They will point to the success of the civil rights movement in integrating blacks. Overall, however, it is not clear that blacks have any more due process and habeas corpus rights under the War on Terror than they had under Jim Crow. The overall loss of civil liberty cancels the blacks’ gains. Indeed, have blacks actually gained any rights when the police with little accountability can shoot down unarmed blacks on the streets and in their own homes? If gun control is needed, why isn’t it needed for the police?

Just as protests against Israel’s atrocities against the Palestinians are being criminalized throughout the West, so is free speech that challenges the self-serving agendas of governments and vested interests. The hope that the Internet and social media would expand free speech have been proven wrong by the move against Alex Jones, the Ron Paul Institute, and antiwar.com by Apple, Twitter, and Google/Facebook. Apparently these corporations are convinced that Western peoples are sufficiently in the power of The Matrix that the attack on the First Amendment will cost them no lost business or condemnation by the public.

That corporations believe that they can attack the First Amendment with no adverse consequences to themselves shows the extent to which the United States has eroded.

The Coming Collapse

Posted by Lou on July 10, 2018
Posted in: Civil disobedience, Civil unrest, Civil war, Civilization, Corruption, Disaster, Economic collapse, Economics, Elites, Idiocracy, Political science, Politics, Trumpf, USA. Leave a comment

http://www.truthdig.com

Chris Hedges

May 20, 2018

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The Trump administration did not rise, prima facie, like Venus on a half shell from the sea. Donald Trump is the result of a long process of political, cultural and social decay. He is a product of our failed democracy. The longer we perpetuate the fiction that we live in a functioning democracy, that Trump and the political mutations around him are somehow an aberrant deviation that can be vanquished in the next election, the more we will hurtle toward tyranny. The problem is not Trump. It is a political system, dominated by corporate power and the mandarins of the two major political parties, in which we don’t count. We will wrest back political control by dismantling the corporate state, and this means massive and sustained civil disobedience, like that demonstrated by teachers around the country this year. If we do not stand up we will enter a new dark age.

The Democratic Party, which helped build our system of inverted totalitarianism, is once again held up by many on the left as the savior. Yet the party steadfastly refuses to address the social inequality that led to the election of Trump and the insurgency by Bernie Sanders. It is deaf, dumb and blind to the very real economic suffering that plagues over half the country. It will not fight to pay workers a living wage. It will not defy the pharmaceutical and insurance industries to provide Medicare for all. It will not curb the voracious appetite of the military that is disemboweling the country and promoting the prosecution of futile and costly foreign wars. It will not restore our lost civil liberties, including the right to privacy, freedom from government surveillance, and due process. It will not get corporate and dark money out of politics. It will not demilitarize our police and reform a prison system that has 25 percent of the world’s prisoners although the United States has only 5 percent of the world’s population. It plays to the margins, especially in election seasons, refusing to address substantive political and social problems and instead focusing on narrow cultural issues like gay rights, abortion and gun control in our peculiar species of anti-politics.

This is a doomed tactic, but one that is understandable. The leadership of the party, the Clintons, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Tom Perez, are creations of corporate America. In an open and democratic political process, one not dominated by party elites and corporate money, these people would not hold political power. They know this. They would rather implode the entire system than give up their positions of privilege. And that, I fear, is what will happen. The idea that the Democratic Party is in any way a bulwark against despotism defies the last three decades of its political activity. It is the guarantor of despotism.

Trump has tapped into the hatred that huge segments of the American public have for a political and economic system that has betrayed them. He may be inept, degenerate, dishonest and a narcissist, but he adeptly ridicules the system they despise. His cruel and demeaning taunts directed at government agencies, laws and the established elites resonate with people for whom these agencies, laws and elites have become hostile forces. And for many who see no shift in the political landscape to alleviate their suffering, Trump’s cruelty and invective are at least cathartic.

Trump, like all despots, has no ethical core. He chooses his allies and appointees based on their personal loyalty and fawning obsequiousness to him. He will sell anyone out. He is corrupt, amassing money for himself—he made $40 million from his Washington, D.C., hotel alone last year—and his corporate allies. He is dismantling government institutions that once provided some regulation and oversight. He is an enemy of the open society. This makes him dangerous. His turbocharged assault on the last vestiges of democratic institutions and norms means there will soon be nothing, even in name, to protect us from corporate totalitarianism.

But the warnings from the architects of our failed democracy against creeping fascism, Madeleine Albright among them, are risible. They show how disconnected the elites have become from the zeitgeist. None of these elites have credibility. They built the edifice of lies, deceit and corporate pillage that made Trump possible. And the more Trump demeans these elites, and the more they cry out like Cassandras, the more he salvages his disastrous presidency and enables the kleptocrats pillaging the country as it swiftly disintegrates.

The press is one of the principal pillars of Trump’s despotism. It chatters endlessly like 18th-century courtiers at the court of Versailles about the foibles of the monarch while the peasants lack bread. It drones on and on and on about empty topics such as Russian meddling and a payoff to a porn actress that have nothing to do with the daily hell that, for many, defines life in America. It refuses to critique or investigate the abuses by corporate power, which has destroyed our democracy and economy and orchestrated the largest transfer of wealth upward in American history. The corporate press is a decayed relic that, in exchange for money and access, committed cultural suicide. And when Trump attacks it over “fake news,” he expresses, once again, the deep hatred of all those the press ignores. The press worships the idol of Mammon as slavishly as Trump does. It loves the reality-show presidency. The press, especially the cable news shows, keeps the lights on and the cameras rolling so viewers will be glued to a 21st-century version of “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.” It is good for ratings. It is good for profits. But it accelerates the decline.

All this will soon be compounded by financial collapse. Wall Street banks have been handed $16 trillion in bailouts and other subsidies by the Federal Reserve and Congress at nearly zero percent interest since the 2008 financial collapse. They have used this money, as well as the money saved through the huge tax cuts imposed last year, to buy back their own stock, raising the compensation and bonuses of their managers and thrusting the society deeper into untenable debt peonage. Sheldon Adelson’s casino operations alone got a $670 million tax break under the 2017 legislation. The ratio of CEO to worker pay now averages 339 to 1, with the highest gap approaching 5,000 to 1. This circular use of money to make and hoard money is what Karl Marx called “fictitious capital.” The steady increase in public debt, corporate debt, credit card debt and student loan debt will ultimately lead, as Nomi Prins writes, to “a tipping point—when money coming in to furnish that debt, or available to borrow, simply won’t cover the interest payments. Then debt bubbles will pop, beginning with higher yielding bonds.”

An economy reliant on debt for its growth causes our interest rate to jump to 28 percent when we are late on a credit card payment. It is why our wages are stagnant or have declined in real terms—if we earned a sustainable income we would not have to borrow money to survive. It is why a university education, houses, medical bills and utilities cost so much. The system is designed so we can never free ourselves from debt.

However, the next financial crash, as Prins points out in her book “Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World,” won’t be like the last one. This is because, as she says, “there is no Plan B.” Interest rates can’t go any lower. There has been no growth in the real economy. The next time, there will be no way out. Once the economy crashes and the rage across the country explodes into a firestorm, the political freaks will appear, ones that will make Trump look sagacious and benign.

And so, to quote Vladimir Lenin, what must be done?

We must invest our energy in building parallel, popular institutions to protect ourselves and to pit power against power. These parallel institutions, including unions, community development organizations, local currencies, alternative political parties and food cooperatives, will have to be constructed town by town. The elites in a time of distress will retreat to their gated compounds and leave us to fend for ourselves. Basic services, from garbage collection to public transportation, food distribution and health care, will collapse. Massive unemployment and underemployment, triggering social unrest, will be dealt with not through government job creation but the brutality of militarized police and a complete suspension of civil liberties. Critics of the system, already pushed to the margins, will be silenced and attacked as enemies of the state. The last vestiges of labor unions will be targeted for abolition, a process that will soon be accelerated given the expected ruling in a case before the Supreme Court that will cripple the ability of public-sector unions to represent workers. The dollar will stop being the world’s reserve currency, causing a steep devaluation. Banks will close. Global warming will extract heavier and heavier costs, especially on the coastal populations, farming and the infrastructure, costs that the depleted state will be unable to address. The corporate press, like the ruling elites, will go from burlesque to absurdism, its rhetoric so patently fictitious it will, as in all totalitarian states, be unmoored from reality. The media outlets will all sound as fatuous as Trump. And, to quote W.H. Auden, “the little children will die in the streets.”

As a foreign correspondent I covered collapsed societies, including the former Yugoslavia. It is impossible for any doomed population to grasp how fragile the decayed financial, social and political system is on the eve of implosion. All the harbingers of collapse are visible: crumbling infrastructure; chronic underemployment and unemployment; the indiscriminate use of lethal force by police; political paralysis and stagnation; an economy built on the scaffolding of debt; nihilistic mass shootings in schools, universities, workplaces, malls, concert venues and movie theaters; opioid overdoses that kill some 64,000 people a year; an epidemic of suicides; unsustainable military expansion; gambling as a desperate tool of economic development and government revenue; the capture of power by a tiny, corrupt clique; censorship; the physical diminishing of public institutions ranging from schools and libraries to courts and medical facilities; the incessant bombardment by electronic hallucinations to divert us from the depressing sight that has become America and keep us trapped in illusions. We suffer the usual pathologies of impending death. I would be happy to be wrong. But I have seen this before. I know the warning signs. All I can say is get ready.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, New York Times best selling author, former professor at Princeton University, activist and ordained Presbyterian minister. He has written 11 books,…

How The United Kingdom Became A Police State

Posted by Lou on July 7, 2018
Posted in: Britain, Civil rights, Civil unrest, Criminology, Fascism, law, Militarization of the police, Police, Police state, Politics, UK. Leave a comment

“In his 10 years in power from 1997 to 2007, Tony Blair passed an astonishing 26,849 laws in total, an average of 2,663 per year or 7.5 a day. The Labour Party continued this madness under Gordon Brown who broke the record in 2008 by passing 2,823 new laws, a 6% increase on even his megalomaniac predecessor.”

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http://www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Neema Parvini via The Mises Institute,

This article will demonstrate how the United Kingdom has steadily become a police state over the past twenty years, weaponizing its institutions against the people and employing Orwellian techniques to stop the public from seeing the truth. It will demonstrate, contrary to official narratives, that both overall levels of crime and violent crime have been increasing, not decreasing, as the size of the state in the UK has gotten bigger. It will also expose how the Labour government under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown from 1997 to 2010, deliberately obscured real crime data with estimated crime rates based on survey data as opposed to the real numbers. I will demonstrate that, contrary to popular opinion perpetuated by progressive myths, life was much safer in Britain during the era of classical laissez-faire from the 1850s to 1911.

In his 10 years in power from 1997 to 2007, Tony Blair passed an astonishing 26,849 laws in total, an average of 2,663 per year or 7.5 a day. The Labour Party continued this madness under Gordon Brown who broke the record in 2008 by passing 2,823 new laws, a 6% increase on even his megalomaniac predecessor. In 2010, Labour’s last year in power before handing over the reigns to the Blairite social radical, David Cameron, there was a 54% surge in privacy cases brought against public bodies, and the Cabinet were refusing freedom of information requests at a rate of 51%. The vast number of new laws under Labour does not count the 2,100 new regulations the EU passed in 2006 alone, which apparently is average for them.

Many of these vast changes under Blair and Brown were in the area of criminal law. By 2008, Labour had created more than 3,600 new offences. Many of these, naturally, were red-tape regulations. To give you an idea:

  • Creating a nuclear explosion
  • Selling types of flora and fauna not native to the UK, such as the grey squirrel, ruddy duck or Japanese knotweed
  • To wilfully pretend to be a barrister or a traffic warden
  • Disturbing a pack of eggs when instructed not to by an authorised officer
  • Obstructing workers from carrying out repairs to the Dockland Light Railway
  • Offering for sale a game bird killed on a Sunday or Christmas Day
  • Allowing an unlicensed concert in a church hall or community centre
  • A ship’s captain may end up in court if he or she carries grain without a copy of the International Grain Code on board
  • Scallop fishing without the correct boat
  • Breaking regulation number 10 of the 1998 Apple and Pear Grubbing Up Regulations
  • Selling Polish Potatoes

There are many more. However, there were also some more serious breaches of civil liberty.

One common tactic of the Blair government was to use a moral panic to pass radical new legislation. For example, in 2006, he passed the Terrorism Act that overturned habeas corpus and gave the British police the right to detain anyone for any reason for 90 days. At the time, this got widespread public support because of the recent 7/7 bombings in London. This means that, in the UK, the police can arrest you without you necessarily having committed a crime if they can brand your activities as “terrorist” or “extremist.” Although these laws were ostensibly brought about to combat Islamic terrorism, the ever-expanding definitions of “far right” and “extremist” demonstrate how they can be weaponised against the British people.

Another area in which the Labour government used moral panic cynically to overturn longstanding common law principles was the murder of Stephen Lawrence, which they used to eliminate the double jeopardy rule and, as per the MacPherson report, to put an end to colour-blind policing.

Recently there have been an increased number of cases in which the British state has encroached on civil liberties in a near-openly tyrannical way. The Count Dankula case, for example, in which a man was arrested for “hate speech,” then tried and made to pay a fine for telling off-colour jokes about the Nazis on Youtube. Then there was the young woman who was found guilty of being “grossly offensive” for posting Snoop Dogg lyrics on her Instagram account. And, most recently, the political activist Tommy Robinson was arrested and tried in mere hours for recording outside a courtroom. In each of these cases, despite some protests against the legal rulings, the media broadly sided with the courts, citing the technicalities of the law – in the former two cases section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 (another Blair special) – and brand anyone who would protest “far right” or “extremist.”

“Gaslighting” is a word from the world of psychology; it is a technique of manipulation to achieve power. Here are eleven warning signs:

  1. They tell blatant lies.
  2. They deny they ever said something, even though you have proof.
  3. They use what is near and dear to you as ammunition.
  4. They wear you down over time.
  5. Their actions do not match their words.
  6. They throw in positive reinforcement to confuse you.
  7. They know confusion weakens people.
  8. They project.
  9. They try to align people against you.
  10. They tell you or others that you are crazy.
  11. They tell you everyone else is a liar.

The British state has become increasingly Orwellian in its gaslighting of the British public since at least 1997 with near-total complicity from the media. In a recent article for Quillette, I argued that this has been the case in both Britain and the USA for years.

This has especially been the case in the area of crime. During a period in which both the Labour Party and the Conservative Party have become increasingly statist and interventionist on both an economic and civil level, we have been continually told that one of the positive effects of ever-increasing government control is that society is becoming more peaceful. This is the narrative, for example, of Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. In 2005, The Guardian told us that since 1995 overall crime had decreased by 44%. Almost a decade later the same publication wondered out loud what could be causing the continued decline in crime rates in the UK. And just a few years after that, they had changed their tune completely decrying sudden increases in violent crime and blaming this on cuts in police numbers. In the first few months of 2018, the shocking increases in instances of violent crime in Sadiq Khan’s London, which in the past year has seen rises of 31.3% in knife crime, 78% in acid attacks, 70% in youth homicides, 33.4% in robberies, 18.7% in burglaries, 33.9% in theft and 30% in child sex crime.  But this story told by The Guardian – of a general trend down in crime over the past twenty years followed by a sudden and inexplicable spike – is simply not true, as I will demonstrate in this paper.

In 1997, Tony Blair famously ran on a platform of being ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’. Unfortunately for him, the reality of empirical crime data had stubbornly refused to comply with his anointed vision through his first years in power. “New Labour” were famous for the efficiency of their propaganda machine. American readers will no doubt be aware of Mr. Blair’s complicity in making exaggerated claims about Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction” in the run up to the war in Iraq, but few readers – British, American, or otherwise – will know that the Blair government was also lying about the extent of crime in Britain. The Labour Party, who were so much about media perceptions and political spin, needed to find a way to show on paper that their “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” agenda was making good on its promise. So, in 2003, Tony Blair permanently changed the way crime is reported in the UK by introducing the National Crime Recording Standard’ (NCRS). Up until that point, crime in the UK was reported using hard data drawn from actual arrests and convictions from the police. However, from that point onwards, the official statistics were to be drawn from the British Crime Survey which estimates crime based on a survey of 50,000 people aged 16 or over. This works much like how television companies produce estimates for their show ratings. So that means that the statistics you see quoted in newspapers like The Guardian are not hard figures, but estimates drawn from surveys. Whatever the merits of this method, it produced a graph for the Blair government that looked like this:

This change ostensibly came about because – as part of the “tough on the causes of crime” part of their pledge, Labour wanted to count victims as opposed to the total number of offenders. Of course, this takes a huge number of crimes out of the data. For example, as it was introduced in 2003, because only over 16-year olds could be interviewed, crimes against minors were not registered in the official statistics. Also, because interviews had to take place in private properties, street crime habitually would not show up in these numbers. Of course, so-called “victimless” crimes – fraud or online crime – do not show up in this data either. Once you start to account for some of these caveats, it becomes more obvious why this extraordinary change in methodology would produce a downwards trend in the data. In fact, it was explicitly designed so that, because of these changes, it could not be compared with numbers before 2002.

In 2007, Ken Pease and Graham Farrell estimated that the survey data could be underestimating violent crime by as much as 82%, with the real number of victims closer to 4.4 million than 2.4 million. This massive margin of error means that the real crime rate becomes a matter for debate as opposed to a question of hard evidence. It seems to me that this was a deliberate choice by the Blair government. Hence, we now find the BBC wondering about what the real crime rate might be.   And this is where the true extent of the Orwellian nightmare of the Blair and Gordon Brown years dawns: by making the crime rate an estimate neither political party can reliably point to the facts, and it always becomes a question of one difficult to substantiate narrative against another. “Post-truth” did not start with Vladimir Putin or Donald Trump – Tony Blair was doing it from the minute he stepped into office.

However, real numbers of convicted offenders are still recorded and kept, although they are somewhat difficult to obtain. In the run-up to the 2010 British election, Conservative MP and Shadow Justice Secretary, Chris Grayling, requested the real numbers from the House of Commons library which duly produced a series of independent reports. Incidentally, once the leader of the Tories, David Cameron, became prime minister in 2010, Chris Grayling became the Secretary for Justice and, to my knowledge, was happy to let this little detail slide and continue with the survey-based methodology. It is funny how power can change the incentives for action.

In any case, the numbers that Grayling requested are damning for anyone who claims that either overall crime or violent crime decreased in the UK between 1997 and 2010.

The population of the UK was about 58 million people in 1997. In 2008, that had increased to 62 million, an increase of 6.87%. In that same period male violent crime convictions in England and Wales increased by around 63.92% from 49,153 in 1997 to 80,574 in 2008. So violent crime convictions increased by more than ten times the growth of the population.

Increases like this can been seen across virtually every category of crime. Convictions for persons under 18, for example, increased by 60.18% from 12,806 in 1997 to 20,513 in 2008, in keeping with the average increase in violent crime, this is ten times the rate of population growth in the same period. Knife crime practically doubled during the Blair years, from 3,360 offenders in 1997 to 6,368 in 2008. In 1998 there were 5,542 robberies, in 2008 there were 8,475. From the year 2000 to 2008, the total number of arrests for any offence went up from 1.2 million to 1.4 million, an increase of about 17%.

For the claim to be true that violent crime went down 44% during the 00s in the UK, it would have to be at a time when violent crime convictions went up 64%. For the claim to be true that overall crime went down in from 1997 to 2008, it would have to be at a time when overall convictions for crime went up by 17%. Both claims seem extraordinary: how could there be a rise in convictions without a corresponding increase in crime? The methodology that measures victims through estimates from survey data clearly is not getting this correct.

If we use recorded convictions in this way, as opposed to estimates, we can make meaningful comparisons to the past as Peter Hitchens does in The Abolition of Liberty. As we have seen, the total number of convictions in England and Wales for 2008 was around 1.47 million for a population of 62 million people, around 2.25% of the population. According to Hitchens the comparable number in 1861 at the height of laissez-faire was 88,000 for a population of 20,066,224, or around 0.44% of the population. In 1911, before Leviathan and the welfare state had really had a chance to grow, the number was 97,000 for a population of 36,075,269, or around 0.27% of the population. The claim that crime has risen because of government cuts to the numbers of police also cannot stand since in 1911 there were 51,203 officers whereas by 2009 there were 144,353 officers. The increase in police officers from 1911 to 2009 therefore is 181.92% compared with an increase of 71.86% in total population. So the size of the repressive apparatuses of the state have increased greatly, and with it the total number of criminals.

It is clear that with less personal freedom and a bigger and more invasive state comes less personal responsibility and greater lawlessness. It is also clear that as the British state has become more top-down in orientation than in its common-law past, it has levied increased coercive legislative power against the British people it supposedly serves. The state is now behaving in an openly Orwellian manner with near-explicit contempt for the public.

Former Central Banker: Oil Pipeline Protesters Will Be Killed. So Be It.

Posted by Lou on June 15, 2018
Posted in: Anarchism, Canada, Civil disobedience, Civil unrest, Corporatocracy, Criminology, Oil, Oil spill, Pipelines, Uncategorized. 2 Comments
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(CD) — As Canada’s controversial Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project faces ongoing opposition, the former governor of the Bank of Canada said that protesters may die but that the government should push the project through anyway.

Speaking at an event Wednesday, David Dodge said, “We’re going to have some very unpleasant circumstances,” the Edmonton Journal reported. “There are some people that are going to die in protesting construction of this pipeline. We have to understand that.”

“Nevertheless, we have to be willing to enforce the law once it’s there,” Dodge said. “It’s going to take some fortitude to stand up.”

In an interview with the Journal, he elaborated by saying, “We have seen it other places, that equivalent of religious zeal leading to flouting of the law in a way that could lead to death.”

Dodge’s comments prompted outrage from climate activists.

Author and 350-org co-founder Bill McKibben warned, “North American governments have shown the ‘fortitude’ necessary to kill indigenous people often enough that this is no idle threat,” while Canandian author Naomi Klein called the threat a “disgrace.” She added, “If the worst happens, we now know they went into this with their eyes wide open.”

Greenpeace climate and energy campaigner Mike Hudema, meanwhile, wondered if Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau would weigh in on Dodge’s remarks.

Is Prime Minister going to condemn these comments from former Bank of Canada governor basically saying – ‘We need this pipeline. If people need to die because of it. Well so be it that’s the cost of doing business.’

1:06 PM – 14 Jun 2018

Trudeau was the target of sharp criticism from environmental advocacy groups after announcing last month that the government would purchase the pipeline and expansion system, which will roughly triple the system’s capacity. That $4.5 billion buyout, commented the B.C.-based Dogwood Initiative, makes every taxpayer “partial owner of a leaky 65-year-old pipeline—and the proponent of a still uncosted oil tanker expansion project.”

Dodge, for his part, has been described as “not inclined to hold his tongue.”

His comments about the pipeline protesters come days after he accused climate activists of making it harder to enact policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and said Canada should “sell our hydrocarbons, which we produce, to foreigners at the highest possible market price….including the sale of bitumen from the oilsands, while demand for oil is robust and still growing.”

By Andrea Germanos / Creative Commons

So What Happens To America After The California Earthquake?

Posted by Lou on May 25, 2018
Posted in: Armageddon, Catastrophe, Civil unrest, Criminology, Earthquakes, End times prophecy. Leave a comment
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May 25, 2018

Piers Corbyn says we are entering a Grand Solar Minimum in 2019 and this means we will have more earthquakes and volcanoes due to decreased solar activity allowing more cosmic radiation (i.e. nuclear particles) to bombard the earth.

Arizona has been making plans for receiving 400,000 Californians after an earthquake. Dream on. There are 18.8 million people in the Los Angeles area and 8.8 million in the San Francisco Bay Area. Southern California borders Mexico, Arizona and Nevada. Northern California borders Oregon and Nevada.

A major quake will take out the hospitals, roads, electric grid, water and sewer services. California has 218,000 people in prisons and jails. This would include thousands of violent defendants on trial. An earthquake might give these bad boys an early release. In 1906 roads 80 miles from the epicenter were thrown 20 feet.

Does anyone have a plan to do anything about criminals from Mexico and bordering US states who will enter the quake area to have a field day looting and raping?

Disease would be widespread within days without water, sewers and hospitals.

If the nuclear power plant at Diablo Valley melts down, then millions more would be motivated to move out of state.

There are multiple volcanoes in southern California. They currently are emitting a Hydrogen Sulfide gas that smells like rotten eggs and can be noticed 120 miles away in populous areas. During a GSM, the sun blocks fewer cosmic rays which activates the magma under  volcanoes. There is also an increase in both the number and severity of earthquakes. Southern California could be covered in volcanic ash. Getting cleaned up without water will be a problem.

The Federal government has not responded well to previous disasters. Thanks mostly to over population, 43% of all Americans are too poor to buy food and pay the rent. 43% of 18.8 million Angelenos would be 8 million people. As disease spreads due to zero water and sanitation, the federal government would have to pay to feed, house and transport 8 million people. Good luck finding water.

And as for the 10 million Angelenos who think they could afford to buy a tank of gas and drive to Mexico, Arizona or Nevada: No power grid means no gas pumps and no ATMs. Californians should always drive with a tank 3/4ths full. Why? They will need that much gas to get to the next gas station. Hint: Leave early and fill up before the price soars to $10 a gallon.

Problem for the middle class Californian: Credit card companies might turn off your cards if your home is in the quake zone and you are suddenly unemployed. You will need actual cash. California refineries will likely be offline so those gas stations still standing will be waiting to get supplied by refineries in Texas. Remember: First come, first served.

The Department of Homeland Security has issued guidelines for school safety. In case of a shooting you can throw staplers and other office supplies at the bad man with a gun. You might choose to arm yourself with staplers (or other more serious weapons) before you start your road trip. Of course the poor who seek federal assistance will be disarmed before they get their first government handout.

Also requiring assistance will be hospital patients who survive the collapse of the buildings and anyone injured on Day One or catches diseases after Day Two due to a lack of food, shelter, water and sewers. California has over 700,000 in long term care including hospices. They have a large population of cancer patients, people on Kidney dialysis and with HIV. Cumulatively, these special needs people will be a greater burden than the federal government can handle.

There are 750,000 Mormons in California. The ones that leave will do so in well armed caravans with destinations in Oregon, Idaho, Utah, Nevada and Arizona. They will get jobs and substantial help. Not so sure about the Californians who wait to Day Two to flee.

There are 2.5 million blacks in California. Blacks are currently often used for target practice in California by some Mexicans. If there is a major quake, very few blacks will have the means to migrate to Atlanta, the nearest, prosperous safe town for them. Most of the nearly 2,200 miles will be unfriendly. The majority of blacks could never afford the gas and food they need for the trip, especially if their credit cards are turned off.

The rest of America -white and black – might not like the sudden ethnic change when they see Californians arriving by the millions. 43% do not speak English at home. 38.8% are Hispanics. 14.8% are Asians. 3% are mixed race. 400,000 are Muslims. Latinos might face reprisals if there is a lot of anti-black violence in California.

Depressions are caused by the cancellation of Unpayable Debts. We have more Unpayable Debts now than at anytime in history. Anything could tip us over into a financial collapse far worse than 1933. 3 million Americans starved to death in the Great Depression.

The Elite decided to add 200 million people to our population and to send millions of industrial jobs overseas since 1929. Some corporations will definitely collapse when California, the sixth largest economy in the world, has a major earthquake. Insurance and bank stocks will definitely collapse. 43% of Americans already cannot buy food and pay rent. So what happens when foreigners dump the dollar and prices double overnight? Inflation would cancel Food Stamps. The day Food Stamps end, will be the day we have Nationwide Food Riots. Food riots will make resettling Californians impossible because tens of millions will be fleeing America’s cities. Those Food Riots will likely turn into Race Riots.

This is not the 1930s. People in 2018 can’t walk a mile outside their front doors and shoot deer and rabbits for dinner or find a farm with chickens and gardens within walking distance. We had gangs and violence then but today we have nearly 2 million gang members. And the Elite has trained to believe Identity politics which says whites are wrong and minorities are right. Food Rioters today could easily sack and loot every major city. When all the super markets are looted, we will have no way to distribute food to 100 million people.

No politician has made any plan to survive any earthquakes in either California or on the New Madrid fault.

Other Articles By Me:

Normally, I write about other topics.

Either Say No To The Jewish Lobby Or Die

https://vidrebel.wordpress.com/2017/11/09/either-say-no-to-the-jewish-lobby-or-die/

Dianne Feinstein: Thy Name Is Corruption

https://vidrebel.wordpress.com/2013/01/06/dianne-feinstein-thy-name-is-corruption/

Lasha Darkmoon At Her Best. Please Share This.

https://vidrebel.wordpress.com/2013/10/20/lasha-darkmoon-at-her-best-please-share-this/

To Stop WW III Just Tell The Truth About Epicyte And GMO Corn.

https://vidrebel.wordpress.com/2012/10/10/to-stop-ww-iii-just-tell-the-truth-about-epicyte-and-gmo-corn/

 

About horse237

I have decided to share two of the visions I had as a child. When I was eight, I had a vision of a future war that killed 99.5% of the world’s population. When I was 16 and living in the projects, I had a vision of my future. I was to live in complete obscurity until it came time to stop WW III. When I was about ten, I had read a bio of Nikita Khrushchev which said he survived Stalin by playing the bumbling fool an old Russian peasant trick. I decided to do the same as I had already learned that we did not live in a democracy. The other vision I had when I was in third grade was of the Mind of God and how it interacted in the creation of the world we see. I believe you and I were born at this time precisely so we would have an opportunity to stop this war. As for my personal info, I grew up on military bases and in housing projects. My legs atrophied from starvation as a child. My second step-father died in prison. I used to have to rub my skin to simulate human contact. They did not feed me when I was a child. I do not fight in their wars as an adult.

Putting London’s “Soaring” Homicide Rate In Perspective

Posted by Lou on May 10, 2018
Posted in: Civil unrest, Crime, Criminology, London, USA. Leave a comment

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http://www.zerohedge.com

London has a problem with rising violent crime, that is unfortunately a fact.

According to Metropolitan Police statistics, there was a 51 percent rise in murders from financial year 16/17 to 17/18. Picking up on the issue, U.S. President Trump said at an NRA rally on Friday that one particular hospital in the UK capital was “like a “war zone” due to knife attack victims. This though, as Statista’s Martin Armstrong notes, is a UK problem, and while the problem should absolutely not be played down, it is a problem on a UK scale, too.

Infographic: London's homicide rate in perspective | Statista

You will find more infographics at Statista

Looking at the broader offense category ‘homicide’, London had a rate per 100,000 population of 1.8 in the twelve months ending March 31 this year (including eight deaths that were due to terrorism).

On a U.S. scale though, and when comparing to the biggest cities there, this rate is low – lower than any of the 50 largest in the country, in fact. San Diego is the safest of the major U.S. cities, with a homicide rate of 2.2. New York had a rate of 3.4 in 2017. Looking to the top of the list, Baltimore has an astonishing rate of 55.8.

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