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Pandemic Could Be Solved Quickly
Pandemic Could Be Solved Quickly If Politics Thrown Out: Dr. Ben Carson
“We’ve been having tunnel vision” dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Ben Carson told EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” program.
“Let’s throw the politics out. We could solve this problem pretty quickly,” he stated in an interview that will premiere on Dec. 18 at 7 p.m. New York time.
“Let’s open this thing up to all the different mechanisms,” said Carson, a renowned neurosurgeon who was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom—the highest civilian award in the nation—in 2008 for his work. He retired in 2013 and ran for the presidency in 2016, before serving as the secretary of Housing and Urban Development during the Trump administration.
“Let’s look around the world at things that work. Let’s look at the fact that on the western coast of Africa, there’s almost no COVID. And let’s ask ourselves, why is that? And then you see, it’s because they take antimalarials, particularly hydroxychloroquine. Let’s study that. Let’s see what’s going on there.
“Let’s listen to these physician groups who’ve had incredible success with ivermectin. Let’s look at the results with monoclonal antibodies. Let’s look at all of these things. Let’s put them all in our armamentarium so that we don’t have a one-size-fits-all system.”
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) at one time had authorized hydroxychloroquine for treating certain COVID-19 patients but quickly revoked the emergency use authorization (EUA) in June 2020, claiming no data showed its effectiveness.
The FDA hasn’t approved or issued an EUA for ivermectin to treat COVID-19, citing the same reasons.
Using hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin to treat COVID-19 patients has been highly controversial. Some studies show, and some doctors claim, that hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin can effectively treat COVID-19 patients. A vaccine confidence insight report (pdf) from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) labeled such claims as misinformation or disinformation.
“COVID is a virus. Viruses mutate. That’s what they do. And they will continue to mutate,” Carson said.
Carson pointed out that fortunately, most of the time, viruses become a little weaker with each mutation.
“We can admit that and deal with it, or we can take every little mutation and every little change and try to make it into a crisis so we can frighten people and control their lives more,” Carson said.
The latest variant has been named Omicron. During a White House COVID-19 Task Force briefing on Dec. 15, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said that she expected Omicron cases to increase in the coming weeks, urging people to take preventive measures such as being vaccinated and getting booster doses.
Carson said he has some concerns with how COVID-19 is being utilized to “manipulate and frighten people.”
“We should be using every tool available to us to fight the pandemic. There’s no question about that,” Carson said.
“But that means, you know, therapeutics, which had been poo-pooed. And I understand why. Because in order to get an EUA—an emergency use authorization—to pursue the vaccines, you can’t have anything that’s effective as an alternative. So, that’s a defect in our system, we need to get rid of that.
“I think a lot of people died unnecessarily because we had that attitude,” Carson added. He shared that when he contracted the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus and was severely ill, monoclonal antibodies saved his life. He said monoclonal antibodies weren’t really utilized the way they should have been early on.
The FDA issued its first EUA for monoclonal antibodies to treat COVID-19 patients in November 2020.
“There are many things that have been very effective that we have not pursued, including natural immunity,” Carson said.
“Well, why wouldn’t you collect that information? Why wouldn’t you want to know that? The only reason you wouldn’t do that is because you didn’t want to know the answer,” he said. “Because it didn’t fit very neatly into what you’re trying to do, which is get everybody to be vaccinated.”
That’s one of the reasons people are losing confidence in federal health agencies, he suggested.
Last month, the CDC said it had no record of naturally immune people transmitting the CCP virus.
“A lot of people who probably should be vaccinated are not doing it because they see these inconsistencies, these things that make absolutely no sense,” Carson said. “This demand that everybody get a vaccination, except if you’re coming across the southern border illegally, then it’s not all that important.”
Carson also opposes forcing children to be vaccinated.
“We have a situation where you have the government advocating that children be vaccinated, even though the risk for death for a child with COVID is 0.025 percent, essentially the same as it is for seasonal flu. You don’t see us doing all this every year for seasonal flu,” Carson stated.
“The risk of mortality for a healthy child is approaching zero, and yet we’re saying do this without knowing what the long-term risks are?” he said.
“And why would you subject an innocent child to a lifetime of unknown risk? It just makes absolutely no sense.
“We need to have faith in our government. We need to have faith in our health care systems. And by injecting politics into it, I think we have put ourselves behind the eight ball. It’s going to take a while to reestablish that trust,” he said.
“Why not learn how to look at what’s logical and what makes sense? And why not encourage discussion of those things, rather than everybody getting their respective corners and shooting hand grenades at each other?”
The way out is real leadership, he said.
“The only path is strong leadership. We don’t have that.”
I'll say what Dr. Carson shied away from saying: There's money to be made with the vax, and mandatory vaxxes. I mean, he said as much, but he wasn't blunt enough. The half million dead Americans blamed on Trump, are more properly blamed on Fauci and associates.
FGC-9
For those unfamiliar, the FGC-9 (FGC stands for Fuck Gun Control) was invented by a man in Germany who went by the name JStark1809, with the help of people he befriended online. Their goal was to make a gun that anyone could build at home without any regulated components or even much skill.
They came up with ways to build everything from a fire control group to a rifled barrel, and all with parts that wouldn’t raise suspicions if you were to order them on the internet or even buy them locally.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zri2qTZDA44 (that's over an hour long, relevant portion starts at 4:35)
Jstark worked tirelessly towards two simple goals: freedom of expression, and an individual right to keep and bear arms. After being raided by German police, he died of cardiac arrest.
https://noqreport.com/2021/10/14/3d-printing-pioneer-jstark-dies-under-suspicious-circumstances/
That's mostly old news, so far. Today's newsworthy bits are found in Myanmar, or Burma.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DIYGuns/comments/re11v4/rebel_part_of_the_peoples_defense_forces_in/
https://slickgunsnews.com/gun-controls-death-throes-burmese-rebels-use-fgc-9-3d-printed-guns-to-resist-army-coup/
2021 has been a particularly bad year in Burma (a.k.a. Myanmar, but that’s another story). After decades of military dictatorship, the country finally started to see some freedom and representative government during the last decade. That upswing came to an abrupt end when the military claimed election fraud and took control of the government, establishing yet another military junta.
Protests started almost immediately and are still ongoing, but protests are often met with military violence and murder.
This left Burma’s people with a tragic choice: accept more violent military totalitarianism or fight back against and risk their lives. While there have certainly been setbacks, and many rebel fighters have been killed, they’ve had some limited successes, including the attempted defection of high-level junta officials.
But, with every success, the junta gets more brutal, killing unarmed civilians with military vehicles and even burning them alive to discourage people from fighting.
https://twitter.com/ThangDeihTuang/status/1468143235008974854
not for weak stomachs NSFW
11 unarmed villagers from Dontaw village in Salingyi,Sagaing Division were tied up in their back and burned alive to death in on Dec 7 at around 8 am,
@Khithitofficial
reported.#WhatsHappeningInMyanmar
The Lesson of the FGC-9 in Burma
The most important thing we can take from this is that gun control is no longer a useful strategy for tyrants who want to remain in power. With a few files downloaded from the internet and only a few hundred dollars worth of tools and materials, just about anyone can build their own FGC-9 at home.Because the most stressed components in the FGC-9 are made with metal parts, the gun can last for thousands of rounds. There are even guides online to make your own 9mm ammunition for it using unregulated components.
That people in one of the poorest countries on the planet can and do build them at home shows that gun control is effectively dead in 2021. Tyrants the world over will now have to think twice. They can’t stop the signal.
Another anti-gun argument that has flatlined is what I like to call “Shrodinger’s rifle.” Weapons like the AR-15 are simultaneously fearsome weapons of war that we must remove from the streets to protect the children, but are also wholly ineffective against military weapons like tanks and warplanes. Like Shrodinger’s cat, the forces of civilian disarmament claim semi-automatic weapons are two things at once.
Seeing rebel fighters successfully using these 9mm carbines against a military with tanks and warplanes shows that the latter part of the “Shrodinger’s rifle” argument is verifiably false. It also shows that a semi-automatic carbine is an effective way to protect innocent people from murderous tyrants.
meet the monster raging monkey men
OK, so it's not exactly news. It's just two guys discussing their views on politics. Still, it's informative. 10 minute vidya, take it or leave it. I really don't care that you don't click on random videos on Youtube. Just take it or leave it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQ9mMR76y64
crime down, murders up, impotent fools can't figure it out
Philadelphia’s District Attorney is pushing back on the notion that violence is on the rise, despite the more than 500 people murdered so far this year — insisting that there is a gun violence crisis, but not “a crisis of violence” in the city.
“We don’t have a crisis of lawlessness,” he said.
During a testy exchange with reporters during his weekly gun crime update Monday, Larry Krasner pointed to the fact overall violent crime in the city is down about 3% compared to last year.
“As we report on a true crisis when it comes to gun violence in the United States, or also in Philadelphia, I think it’s important that we don’t let this become mushy and bleed that there is a big spike in crime,” he said. “There isn’t. There is not a big spike in crime — that is not true. There is also not a big spike in violent crime, either.”
Blame the guns, right? It's all the fault of gun manufacturers. Guns goad criminals into criminality, right? Don't suspect for one moment that liberal policies like low-bond and no-bond releases actually encourage criminals to be criminals. He's half right, there isn't really a spike in crime, it's just the criminals that he coddles are becoming more violent.
https://bigleaguepolitics.com/kamala-harris-staffers-point-to-vp-as-soul-destroying-toxic-boss/
Meanwhile, more and more people are exposing the Vice President as a soul sucking ghoul. Of course, we knew that alrady. This is the woman who kept black men chained up in firefighting crews, even after ordered by the courts to free them.
No less than 19 present and former staffers and personnel associated with Vice President Kamala Harris have spoken negatively of Harris, according to reporting of the Washington Post published last week.
Accounts of Harris staffers have pointed to laziness and callousness on her part, as well as a willingness to behave in an abusive manner towards staff. “It’s clear that you’re not working with somebody who is willing to do the prep and the work,” one former staffer said. “With Kamala you have to put up with a constant amount of soul-destroying criticism and also her own lack of confidence So you’re constantly sort of propping up a bully and it’s not really clear why.”
Not to worry too much though.
Kyle Rittenhouse Reveals He Plans to Become a Lawyer to Fight “POS” Prosecutors
Exonerated Illinois youth Kyle Rittenhouse revealed on Monday that he’s planning on becoming a criminal defense lawyer, speaking in his second major interview since a Kenosha County, Wisconsin court found him not guilty of homicide charges stemming from a self defense event in August 2020.
Rittenhouse singled out Kenosha County assistant prosecutor Thomas Binger, pointing to Binger’s track record of misconduct in his case as a motivating factor for him to pursue a career in the legal field. Rittenhouse was speaking with The Blaze’s Elijah Schaffer and Sydney Watson.
“I want to be a lawyer. I want to go to law school,” said Rittenhouse, revealing he had decided to go for a law career near the end of his homicide trial. “I want to go against corrupt piece of s*** prosecutors like Thomas Binger, and put them in their place and make sure they never practice law again.”
Binger was implicated in hiding critical evidence from the defense team during Rittenhouse’s trial, including a high-definition FBI drone video that showed Rittenhouse under attack by convicted pedophile Joseph Rosenbaum. He faced rebuke from the judge overseeing the trial, with many pointing to the entire prosecution as a politically motivated charade conducted at the behest of the Democratic Party.
In one revelation, Rittenhouse revealed that he had played Call of Duty on the nights of the trial, in a nod to a ridiculous insinuation on the part of Binger that playing Call of Duty suggested Rittenhouse was prone to violence.
If Kyle can take down a couple hundred activist DAs in the next 16 years, he should have a good shot at the presidency in 2036.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1468025692344532994
https://twitter.com/i/status/1468015792281341956
Ahhhhh, parental responsibility
https://komonews.com/news/nation-world/charging-decision-due-for-parents-in-oxford-high-shooting
PONTIAC, Mich. (AP) — A prosecutor says the parents of a teen accused of killing four students at a Michigan high school were summoned a few hours earlier after a teacher found a drawing of a gun, a person bleeding and the words “help me.”
Oakland County prosecutor Karen McDonald made the disclosure Friday as she filed involuntary manslaughter charges against Jennifer and James Crumbley, the parents of 15-year-old Ethan Crumbley.
McDonald says the gun used in the shootings at Oxford High School was purchased by James Crumbley a week ago and given to the boy.
Ethan Crumbley was returned to his classroom and later emerged from a bathroom, firing a gun at students. He's charged with murder and other charges.
McDonald says Jennifer Crumbley sent her son a text, saying “Ethan, don't do it.”
THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. AP’s earlier story follows below.
Jennifer and James Crumbley were charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter.
“The parents were the only individuals in the position to know the access to weapons,” Oakland County prosecutor Karen McDonald said Thursday. The gun “seems to have been just freely available to that individual."
Ethan Crumbley, 15, has been charged as an adult with two dozen crimes, including murder, attempted murder and terrorism, for the shooting Tuesday at Oxford High School in Oakland County, roughly 30 miles (50 kilometers) north of Detroit.
Four students were killed and seven more people were injured. Three were in hospitals in stable condition.
The semi-automatic gun was purchased legally by Crumbley’s father last week, according to investigators.
Parents in the U.S. are rarely charged in school shootings involving their children, even as most minors get guns from a parent or relative’s house, according to experts.
There's no Michigan law that requires gun owners keep weapons locked away from children. McDonald, however, suggested there's more to build a case on.
Later at a news conference, McDonald said she hoped to have an announcement "in the next 24 hours." She had firmly signaled that Crumbley's parents were under scrutiny when she filed charges against their son Wednesday.
Sheriff Mike Bouchard disclosed Wednesday that the parents met with school officials about their son's classroom behavior, just a few hours before the shooting.
McDonald said information about what had troubled the school “will most likely come to light soon.”
Crumbley stayed in school Tuesday and later emerged from a bathroom with a gun, firing at students in the hallway, police said.
The superintendent for the district late Thursday posted a YouTube video where he said the teenager was called to the office before the shooting but “no discipline was warranted.”
Tim Throne, leader of Oxford Community Schools, said the high school looks like a “war zone” and won’t be ready for weeks. But he repeatedly credited students and staff for how they responded to the violence.
"To say that I am still in shock and numb is probably an understatement. These events that have occurred will not define us," Throne, grim-faced and speaking slowly, said in the 12-minute video.
"I want you to know that there's been a lot of talk about the student who was apprehended, that he was called up to the office and all that kind of stuff. No discipline was warranted," Throne said. "There are no discipline records at the high school. Yes this student did have contact with our front office, and, yes, his parents were on campus Nov. 30."
Throne said he couldn't immediately release additional details.
Now, that's a real can of worms. But, I believe that can of worms needs to be opened. Even more so, if the parents actually purchased the pistol for the boy. Yeah, people my generation handled pistols before age 18. Parents didn't generally purchase a pistol for their kids though. My first pistol purchase wasn't until age 22. None of my elders allowed me unrestricted access to their handguns as a teen. None of my elders would have made the purchase for me. "Shotguns? Hell yeah, use mine anytime. Rifles? Yeah, you can use any of mine except x and y, those are expensive guns and I don't want you messing with them. Buy you a rifle? You got money? Sure, let's go to town and get it! Pistols? Nahhhh, I think you can wait until you can legally purchase your own!"
And, in this case, the kid was obviously having major problems. You don't give a troubled youngster a pistol.
So, let's dive into this nice juicy can of worms! Mmmmmm - look at that fat brownish-red one!! Yummy!
Some additional material on the subject of child access to weapons here: https://komonews.com/news/nation-world/prosecutor-gun-was-freely-available-to-michigan-shooter
And, the Post has a little more information: https://nypost.com/2021/12/03/parents-of-oxford-school-shooting-suspect-ethan-crumbley-to-be-charged/
MSNBC news subverting jury (police video)
Remember the "producer" who was busted following the jury bus? Dude had the potential, and maybe the intention, to dox all the jurors in the trial. NBC issued an "apology", suggesting that they were just kinda sorta accidentally behind the bus.
Video here just damns them to hell and back.
https://twitter.com/bennyjohnson/status/1466042877923008523
The producer intentionally followed that bus,and he was on a pretty clearly defined mission, by order of NBC headquarters in New York.
The chick at the other end of the phone doesn't want to throw her reporter under the bus, so she exposes to the cop that they did, indeed, order their man on the scene to dig up some news on the jurors.
Public defenders common cause with the NRA Supreme Court
Jurisprudence
A Criminal Justice Reformer’s Case for Looser Gun Laws
Public defenders have found common cause with the NRA at the Supreme Court.
By Mary Harris
Nov 29, 202110:00 AMThere’s this case in front of the Supreme Court that haunts me a little bit: New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen. It’s about whether it is too hard to get an unrestricted gun license in New York state. The plaintiffs say they should be able to carry their firearms wherever they want, not just to work or the gun range, and it seems like the court is inclined to agree with them, paving the way to looser gun laws. It makes me uneasy, because gun sales have spiked since the pandemic, and Kyle Rittenhouse was just found not guilty after shooting three people in the middle of a public street. But Sharone Mitchell Jr., a public defender in Chicago, sees it differently.
Mitchell is one of a number of public defenders who’ve sided with Second Amendment activists on this case. They argue that restrictive licensing, combined with a police force that is eager to charge Black and brown people with weapons possession, adds up to mass incarceration, and that loosening gun restrictions might right a tremendous wrong. On a recent episode of What Next, I spoke to Mitchell about why he opposes laws criminalizing gun possession, how he thinks about his right-wing allies in this case, and what he believes government should be doing to stop gun violence. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Sharone Mitchell Jr.: I see the people that we’re prosecuting. I think about the young man that I defended who had a gun in his bag that was licensed in another state and he accidentally took it to a bar, and his life was over. That ruined his life. He lost his job, he lost his housing, we had to go to trial. That ruined his life. I think it is understandable to look very early on at this approach and say, of course we should give people felonies for not possessing guns in the correct way. But when you really look at the results and you look at what’s actually happening on the ground, it’s tough to hold that same thought.
Mary Harris: What would have happened to him if he was white and somewhere rural in Illinois?
“Put your gun back in your car. Come back.”
That’s it.
Yeah. That’s it. We ended up winning the jury trial, but he still went to jail. The jury looked at this and said this was a mistake, I don’t think this is felonious conduct.
But they made him fight for it.
He lost a lot. The system made him fight for it. And too often mistakes or bad judgment is treated one way in one place and another way in another place.
You wrote an article, “There’s No Second Amendment on the South Side of Chicago,” in support of the New York public defenders who filed an amicus brief in this Supreme Court case. You talk about the disparate impact of gun laws not just in who gets ensnared by them, but where the enforcement occurs.
Our offense is called UUW, unlawful use of a weapon. And there are different types of UUWs. But the lowest-level felony, the Class 4 felony, 33 percent of the charges statewide come from 11 communities in Chicago, 11 communities in the entire state.
You look at the UUW numbers, you look at how it’s used in Chicago and how it’s used outside of Chicago—and you would think that guns only exist in Chicago. And you would think guns only exist in a small number of communities. And that’s not correct. In other areas of the state, that’s just not the way they approach that situation.
You say the ironic thing about the selective enforcement of gun laws is it’s precisely the people in the communities that get cracked down on who may have the most justified concern for their personal safety. For them, oftentimes gun ownership is part of a terrible downward spiral: Unsafe communities make people seek out weapons for self-protection. Then they get caught up in the justice system on a possession charge. Meanwhile, the police arresting them have done little to actually make their neighborhoods safer.
If these are the communities where you see an uptick in violence, those seem to be the people who have a reason to carry. That’s not something that I do. I live on the South Side of Chicago. But it’s understandable, and I see it every day when I talk to our attorneys, that people are scared. They turn on the news every single day and they hear carjacking, robbery, murder, robbery, carjacking. And people are choosing to protect themselves.
We have this assumption that making things a felony disallows people from performing that act. And I just haven’t been convinced of that. At this point in Chicago, folks are not waiting for the government to tell them that they can carry. And I think too often we overestimate the power of the criminal justice system to solve problems or fix the things that we need. I think people are living under the assumption that because you’ve got this very complicated scheme for getting licensed, that means people aren’t going to carry. I think what it means is that people aren’t going to carry legally.
I agree with what you’re saying about the systemic harm that you’re seeing from possession laws. And I think you’re right that when these laws exist, it’s Black and brown gun owners that get cracked down on. But I can’t help wondering if making it easier to have a firearm will keep people safer from physical harm from a gun.
See, I get you, but I just reject the idea that we’re making it easier to own a firearm. Because that’s not the reality of what’s happening in my communities. Even though we’re sending tons of people to prison, people still have easy access to guns. And even though CPD will take 12,000 guns off of these city streets, there are a hundred thousand guns that haven’t been discovered. So I think that’s my issue. My issue is I agree with folks who support the need for safety and want to use the government’s power to maintain safety. But that doesn’t mean I’m unwilling to be critical of the actual solution.
You’re saying we can’t be safe because the zone is flooded with guns—that’s problem one.
I’m just talking about my community right now, and the clients that I see, the neighbors I see. I don’t think the current scheme makes it hard to get guns. It makes it harder to legally possess a gun. That’s true. But in the end, if somebody decides somebody just got shot in front of my house, or every time I watch the news I’m getting beaten over the head that I live in a hellscape, well, I’m going to possess a gun, whether the government tells me I can or not.
And the question is, how do we respond to that? Again, I just think the way we’re doing it, in a way that is very targeted on a particular type of people who live in a particular type of place, people who the numbers suggest they’re not going to harm anybody are being thrown into prison and being given these felony backgrounds that are going to follow them forever.
If you look at the population of Illinois prisons, there are more people in prison for weapons possession than there are for robbery. There are more people in prison for weapon possession than there is for kidnapping, more than arson or burglary or DUI or forgery or vehicle hijacking or retail theft. This is really becoming kind of the new war on drugs, where there’s a real problem, but our solution to the problem doesn’t actually fix the problem. In fact, it creates way more problems.
But when I think about possession of guns versus, say, possession of heroin, the difference to me is that there’s very little chance that your opioid is going to accidentally discharge on the street and kill someone. You don’t use a drug to defend yourself or to hurt someone else. It’s like a self-directed harm.
So you can only kill yourself with drugs.
It’s just endangering other people to carry a gun, in a different kind of way.
Yeah, I think you’re right. Drugs and guns aren’t the same. My comparison is what we’re seeing is identification of a problem and a solution offered that has very little success at fixing the problem. And it’s exploding. You know, from 2014 to 2019, admissions to IDOC, Illinois Department of Corrections, gun possession went up 27 percent. Everything else went down 38 percent. Arrests were down, crime was down. As a result, we were sending less people to prison. But at that same time, the only offense that was going up was gun possession.
Did that have any impact on the murder rate or suicide rate?
See, that’s the thing. Despite every single year increasing the amount of people that we put in prison or recovering guns, the murder rate continues to go up. And that’s because people are scared. So my solution isn’t like we should turn a blind eye to gun violence and let what happens happens. I’m saying, should we be giving people felonies for this? Should we be only enforcing this law in certain communities? And should we be thinking about solutions that are much more proactive, that actually identify folks who are at risk of harm, at risk of being shot, and actually give them what they need to keep communities safe?
I wonder if you think about the strange bedfellows especially in this Supreme Court case, where there was an amicus brief filed by Bronx Defenders and others talking about their clients and how they are denied access to guns that they want, but they’re teaming up with the kinds of litigants who otherwise might not have their best interests at heart. How do you think about that? Do you worry that the Black and brown people who agree with this argument that’s being made at the Supreme Court are being used?
No. I don’t worry about that. I worry about the safety of my communities. I worry about the people that I represent, whose lives are being derailed by this scheme. I worry about the people who are victims and the families who are victims of gun violence.
The strange bedfellows argument? It’s a complicated issue. I think that often we try to look at issues with red and blue glasses and we try to figure out what side is the conservative side and what side is the liberal side and where do you fit. But there are some issues that are so complicated that it’s not. And while I acknowledge that there are going to be people who hold different political views than me that may be on the same side of our fellow public defenders, I believe that we’re on the right side of this. And if there are other people that choose to be on that side as well, then that’s what they’ve chosen to believe.
I noticed that Chicago came up in oral arguments. Justice Elena Kagan called it the world’s worst place when it came to gun violence.
Yeah, and I think it has one of the world’s worst strategies when it comes to gun violence. Ninety-five, 94, 96 percent of the money that we spend here in the region is focused on responses to gun violence, so police, prosecutors, defense attorneys, sheriffs, people that show up after the harm has happened. And 4 to 6 percent of the spending goes toward prevention. It goes toward actually stopping the harm or trying to stop the harm before it happens.
You know, we have models, we have examples of actually reducing violence in a nontraditional way. But we’re so enamored with this traditional idea of rounding people up, seeing if they have guns, putting them in prison or putting them on probation, taking their guns away. And we’re just addicted to this idea that it’s going to do something. And again, week after week after week after week, we see its failures.
In your ideal world, what does the legal framework around guns look like?
I think it’s a framework that doesn’t include the criminal system. This idea that we criminalize possession of guns, I just don’t think it’s a working model. When somebody presents to the justice system, especially young people in communities that are experiencing high levels of violence, I just don’t think that putting them in prison is an effective response to that risk.
We’ve seen models, interrupter models, violence prevention models, where people are identified to be at the highest level for shooting or being shot. They’re paired with people that can be a positive effect in their life. They’re given the counseling they need to make rational decisions, and they are offered opportunities for real economic future. I feel like that approach is a much more effective approach than indiscriminately sending people to prison and hoping it gets better, when it hasn’t gotten better for years after years after years.
As a person who is on the South Side, who are in communities that suffer from harm, I want people to be held accountable for harm. But more important than that is I want the harm to stop happening. So I’m unwilling to just settle for “Oh, we’re holding people accountable,” if it’s actually not keeping us safer.
When we start talking about loosening the rules around guns, my fear is what happened in Kenosha with Kyle Rittenhouse, where you have a teenager who wants to carry a gun, wants to defend property, goes out into the world. Other people have guns. And the jury essentially seems to have said, well, everyone had guns, so it’s hard to tell really who’s the aggressor. And I worry that we’re setting ourselves up for much more of that, if we’re loosening the restrictions around who can have guns and where they can take them.
I definitely understand us looking at the Rittenhouse case and trying to draw deeper conclusions about it. But the sad reality of the situation is that the vast majority of cases do not include a 17-year old white teen going to a protest and deciding he wants to play cop for day. And I think there’s a real danger in taking a case like that and drawing conclusions of the whole legal system, because that’s just such an outlier.
The Supreme Court seems to have a pretty good chance of taking the side of the gun and rifle folks in this case. But I wonder what’s going to change in Chicago, if anything, if this case succeeds.
I think we’ll have to see what the ruling is. What my hope is is that we start to pull away a little bit from these traditional approaches that have not kept us safe, that we really think about these violence interrupter models that really identify folks who are in trouble and try to resolve the situation. Because for me, the thing that I feel most strongly about is I see folks that are in struggle, and the system’s not giving them anything but more bad. Sticking somebody in prison for two, three, four years, putting them on probation, and then sending them right back to the same communities that they’re in danger is doing nothing to fix the problem. And we spend a fraction of our dollars on some of those interventions that actually get at the solution. So I’m hoping if something were to happen that some people would see as drastic, that we would take the time to be like, OK, we’ve got to redo this thing. What is the best way to spend our limited dollars, not just to seem politically tough, but to actually provide safety for those that are literally under the gun?
If no one else is 'getting it', the public defenders who see their minority clients feeding the classroom-to-prison pipeline are finally 'getting it'.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/11/supreme-court-gun-case-public-defenders.html
opportunity knocking
Dear wife brought this to my attention. "You know how they took Kyle's gofundme down? They've got a gofundme for BROOKS! Can you IMAGINE?!?!?" I hemmed and hawed a little bit, and agreed that would be outrageous. Then I did a search . . .
Very first hit, a site I've never heard of before, https://meaww.com/go-fund-me-allows-fundraiser-for-darrell-brooks-days-after-banning-kyle-rittenhouse-campaign
GoFundMe reportedly banned fundraisers for Kyle Rittenhouse from their platform, saying its “terms of service prohibit raising money for the legal defense of an alleged violent crime” before allowing it back recently. But Law Enforcement Today claimed that the crowdfunding platform reportedly briefly allowed the fundraiser for Darrell Brooks Jr, the suspect in the Waukesha Christmas Parade tragedy. The report also stated that the campaign was up till November 23.
However, it seems the crowdfunding platform has now removed the fundraiser because when MEAWW checked the GoFundMe site, we did not find any page urging money for Brooks Jr. Also, MEAWW has reached out to GoFundMe for a comment.
According to the Law Enforcement Today report, the apparent campaign page for Brooks was started by James Norton, who wrote while urging $5 million as a donation, “On November 21st, 2021 our dear friend Darrell Brooks was arrested for allegedly driving his car into a parade, as someone who knows Darrell personally I can tell you that he would NEVER do such a thing and I know he is innocent of what he was charged with.”
So, going on this one news source, I'm going to say that a friend of Brooks started the gofundme, that it stayed up for some hours, maybe even a day, then when people noticed it, it was taken down.
More searches are in order, but first:
I said opportunity is knocking. Here, BLM, Antifa, and privileged progressive white America has the opportunity to disassociate itself, and disavow, an individual who is obviously guilty of truly heinous crimes. Yeah, the justice system has to consider Brooks innocent until he is proven guilty. I'm not the justice system, neither are you, or BLM, or any other concerned or unconcerned entities. I've watched the vidyas, and Brooks proved himself an inhuman monster. Any individual in the world can look at the videos, and watch bodies flying through the air, just because Brooks felt like watching bodies fly.
Opportunity. Is the progressively crazy community capable of distinguishing between black men who are oppressed, and black men who are capable of committing monstrous crimes? I mean, Tamir Rice is so very obviously in the first group. Various individuals in the years since have been equally innocent, while other individuals have been shady characters, whom I just couldn't get behind. In fact, we can probably define a spectrum, ranging from truly innocent, to out of control criminals who must be dealt with harshly. Can we separate the more heinous crimes against black men, from more honest law enforcement actions with unfortunate results?
Here, I would expect a person, such as aristarchus, who claims to be a philosopher, to help us wade through the maze of legitimate and illegitimate actions by law enforcment. Seriously, ari, feel free to jump in and help us distinguish between young black males who would be a threat to any society from young black males who are persecuted and prosecuted unjustly.
And, this is just the sort of thing we need to see from BLM, Antifa, the Democrats, progressives, as well as liberals. Darrell Brooks is most certainly not equal to Ahmaud Arbery, or John Crawford III, or Breonna Taylor, or any number of innocents killed by racially motivated white people and/or law enforcement.
Come on, ari. I challenge. Help me to rank people on this spectrum. Tell us who we should really be demonstrating for, and who we should be demonstrating against. I'm never going to buy that a black man is innocent just because he is black, any more than I'll buy into the white supremacists presumption that a white man is always innocent, always right, in any confrontation with a non-white.
Waukesha Wisconsin
There is no indication yet what flavor of batshit crazy is responsible here. The city staged their Christmas parade, and a red SUV came flying up behind the parade, intentionally running people over. No casualty count yet, but one witness claims ~30 bodies in one intersection. The SUV continued along the parade route after going through that particular intersection, so 30 may be a conservative number.
Police say they have a "person of interest" in custody, which I presume to mean the driver of the SUV.
There is little in the way of video, and even less in terms of meaningful statements.
https://twitter.com/bill_haus/status/1462575969043206144
https://www.savevideo.xyz/downloads/NorrinR06303580
https://twitter.com/SamKraemerTV/status/1462560504208146438
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIfJ8TU84bw
https://edition.cnn.com/us/live-news/wisconsin-waukesha-christmas-parade-car-plow/index.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIfJ8TU84bw
Here, we see the SUV running into the marching band mentioned in other places.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qqEEQNjo00
Unrequited rage: The demand for mob justice
Unrequited rage: The demand for mob justice in the Rittenhouse trial
Jonathan Turley, opinion contributor - 20m ago
The aftermath of the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict is a lesson in unrequited rage. After a jury of 12 citizens in Kenosha, Wis., acquitted Rittenhouse on all charges, politicians and media figures lashed out at the judge, the jury, and the entire legal system.
Like our politics and our media, the legal system has become a vehicle for collective rage; there is no room for doubt or deviation from our predispositions. Yet, in denouncing "vigilante justice," pundits and politicians seem to be advocating for a form of mob justice.
The difference between vigilante and mob justice? Perspective and numbers.
For some, Rittenhouse running down Sheridan Road in Kenosha with his AR-15 is a vigilante. For Rittenhouse, people chasing him with guns and chains is a mob. Neither involves actual justice, which is what juries mete out through the dispassionate application of law and facts.
Most of us - including his defense counsel, following the verdict - were critical of Rittenhouse and his decision to take his AR-15 to a riot. However, the trial revealed key facts that sharply diverged from past media reports. For the first time, the public was not reading facts filtered and framed by the media. In a great demonstration of the value of cameras in courtrooms, the public could reach its own conclusions.
It turned out that Rittenhouse was not an "outsider" but someone with long, close ties to Kenosha. He spent much of that fateful day in Kenosha cleaning graffiti from the walls of the high school and was asked by a business owner to protect his property that night. He did not chase down his victims and shoot one, Joseph Rosenbaum, 36, in the back as Rosenbaum attempted to flee. Instead, he was attacked by all three men he shot, including one who pointed a gun at his head. Rosenbaum, a convicted child molester with a history of mental illness, threatened to kill him and others earlier.
Yet, the "white supremacist" narrative was a "fact too good to check" by the media, which almost uniformly failed to report on facts supporting the claim of self-defense.
Within days of the shootings, then-presidential candidate Joe Biden referenced Rittenhouse as a "white supremacist" despite no evidence supporting that widely repeated claim.
Likewise, when the judge ruled on motions for Rittenhouse, he was declared a racist. When the jurors ruled for Rittenhouse, they - including a black juror - were declared to be racists, too. When Rittenhouse was allowed to go free, the entire legal system was denounced as racist.
Even after grudgingly stating that we "must abide" by the verdict, President Biden added that the verdict left "many Americans feeling angry and concerned, myself included."
Other leaders went further. New York Major Bill de Blasio called the verdict "disgusting" and a victory for "violent extremism from within our own nation." Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo denounced the verdict as "a stain on the soul of America" and an example of "supremacist vigilantism." (Cuomo, soon to be a criminal defendant in his own trial, may want to consider how mob justice could play out in his case.) Declared Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.): "The judge. The jury. The defendant. It's white supremacy in action. This system isn't built to hold white supremacists accountable. It's why Black and brown folks are brutalized and put in cages while white supremacist murderers walk free."
For Bush and others, it is just that simple: Jurors selected at random were racists because they failed to convict a white defendant who shot three white men.
MSNBC legal analyst and Georgetown law professor Paul Butler - who previously described the trial as "white supremacy on steroids" - said the verdict is a message that "vigilante justice prevailed." MSNBC posted an opinion blog headlined: "Kyle Rittenhouse Trial Was Designed To Protect White Conservatives Who Kill."
Some were not satisfied to simply denounce the jury or judge as racists. Former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick declared that this was the final proof of a "system built on white supremacy" that "further validates the need to abolish our current system." What appeared infuriating to Kaepernick about Kenosha was the absence of mob justice, not a victory of vigilante justice: Rittenhouse personified all of our social ills and had to be punished, sentenced to life in prison on the basis of popular opinion.
That, of course, would transcend evidence or law. It would be a system based on demand, not deliberation - the very definition of mob justice.
What is most concerning is the involvement of many in the media in this movement. We live in the age of "advocacy journalism," in which figures like former New York Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones are lionized for declaring that "all journalism is advocacy." Stanford journalism professor Ted Glasser has insisted that journalism must "free itself from this notion of objectivity to develop a sense of social justice."
For legal analysts, this often means "freeing" ourselves not just from objectivity but from the criminal code. Indeed, after the jury failed to convict as demanded, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler called for the Justice Department to investigate the "miscarriage of justice."
In this case, the legal question under Wisconsin law was neither complex nor confusing: "a person is privileged to threaten or intentionally use force against another for the purpose of preventing or terminating what the person reasonably believes to be an unlawful interference with his or her person by such other person." Lethal force is allowed if "the actor reasonably believes that such force is necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself."
Each use of force by Rittenhouse was preceded by attacks by at least four men. The jury simply had a reasonable doubt that Rittenhouse acted without a reasonable belief that he faced great bodily harm.
Not surprisingly, those facts often were not given as the context for legal analysis. Instead, more amenable hypotheticals were trotted out. After the verdict, MSNBC legal analyst Joyce Vance explained that the verdict was "something akin" to "saying if you go into a bank and rob it and people are trying to apprehend you, you can then shoot your way out and claim self-defense." Except that Rittenhouse was not robbing a bank when he was attacked; he was not doing anything illegal in guarding a business at the owner's request, or walking down the street. The jury decided that the men he shot were not "apprehending" him but, instead, were attacking him without provocation.
The facts of the case are now as irrelevant as the verdict, however, because we are a nation addicted to rage - and rage does not allow for doubt. In the minds of some, Rittenhouse was a vigilante, so his acquittal was vigilante justice. However, swapping mob justice for vigilante justice lacks the same critical element: justice.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/unrequited-rage-the-demand-for-mob-justice-in-the-rittenhouse-trial/ar-AAQWiPY
