[FoxNews] Kamala Harris inaugurated a heyday for shoplifters and created a new industry for stolen goods.
Shoplifting in California has become so rampant that it’s no longer just a petty crime. It’s an $8 billion per year industry where organized "rip crews" strip an entire store, resell the goods, and return to steal again. Even while rates of other crimes have declined, reports of shoplifting have increased through the first half of 2024.
Why has California occupied the top position for retail theft nationwide? This decline of law and order in the state happened on the watch of its former attorney general and our current vice president, Kamala Harris.
Harris’ tenure as attorney general from 2011-2017 produced a poisonous cocktail of activist prosecutors, pro-crime initiatives and efforts to undermine police – all of which emboldened a culture of theft.
In 2023, the Golden State experienced what The New Yorker called "Flash Rob Summer" – a free-for-all crime spree that saw mobs pillaging stores like Yves Saint Laurent, Sunglass Hut, Gucci and Nike. Major cities across the country are at the forefront of this crisis, with Los Angeles and San Francisco scoring as the top two shoplifting cities in the country.
But for California, this November offers a chance to turn the tide. Though California’s electoral votes will all go to the Democratic candidate, a statewide ballot measure called Proposition 36 offers relief for the crime wave of the last several years.
Prop 36 is a strong law-and-order initiative aimed at rolling back Proposition 47, a policy passed in 2014 and overseen by Attorney General Harris that shortsightedly reduced penalties for theft and released thousands of criminals onto the streets.
#2
Newsom is now fighting Prop 36 with all he's got. Then there's Rob Bonta, the current state Attorney General, who rivals Harris in corruption. I would say it's a California thing but it's really centered in San Francisco. Except for Los Angeles, people in the rest of the state tend to be fairly reasonable.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
08/10/2024 12:00 Comments ||
Top||
[X] The height of the battle, the operator and assistant bring the BC box to AGS-17, conversations on radio stations and shots are heard, at the end of the video the battle becomes denser. Note the operator's assistant wears running shoes.
Latest GoPro videos of slain Wagner PMC mercenary in Mali
The height of the battle, the operator and assistant bring the BC box to AGS-17, conversations on radio stations and shots are heard, at the end of the video the battle becomes denser pic.twitter.com/dG86jbvu0x
[Bee] LONDON — In response to desperate pleas from downtrodden citizens throughout the United Kingdom, Russia announced it was preparing to send troops to liberate oppressed British people from communist rule.
British citizens who had been crushed under a communist reign of terror reportedly rejoiced when hearing the news that the brave, freedom-loving Russian military would soon arrive to set them free from the despotic British government.
"We have heard the cries for help from the persecuted British people," Russian President Vladimir Putin said when announcing the operation. "Our forces are now on their way to the United Kingdom to liberate these poor, helpless people from the iron grip of their oppressive communist rulers. We are happy to export the freedom we have here in Russia to the countries of the West."
Upon hearing of their impending liberation, British citizens wept tears of joy. "I have been dreaming of this day!" said London resident Wellington Hamptonshire. "We have been living under communist brutality and oppression for so long that we have forgotten what it feels like to be free. Thank God for the kindness of Russia and Vladimir Putin for risking so much to bring freedom to Great Britain!"
Sources within the British government said Prime Minister Keir Starmer remained committed to retaining power and keeping the people of the UK enslaved under his totalitarian regime.
At publishing time, Russia was rumored to also be in the early stages of making plans to liberate the United States in the event of a Kamala Harris presidency.
Posted by: Frank G ||
08/10/2024 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[11126 views]
Top|| File under: Commies
by Dmitry Bavyrin
"There are people who hope that the President of the United States will give in to pressure and step down, but we are glad to note that you are not going to give them that satisfaction." With these words, conveyed in a 1974 letter through the ambassador, Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev tried to support Richard Milhous Nixon, who was being pushed to resign by the Watergate scandal.
The General Secretary valued his American counterpart as a co-author of "détente": Nixon, like himself, was sincerely afraid of bringing the Cold War to a hot Third World War. They talked a lot, drank together, almost trusted each other - there was a "spark" between them, regardless of the General Secretary's famous kisses. But Brezhnev miscalculated: Nixon was "left" after all.
Leonid Ilyich’s mistake is forgivable because it is common.
Few believed that one of the most popular, successful and powerful US presidents in history could be brought to heel. But in just a few months, Nixon had become a despised bigwig and antagonist who is still casually kicked around at home and who was only spared jail by a pardon from his successor.
Many colossi in history have fallen from conspiracies - sometimes exposed, more often suspected.
Behind the first and so far last voluntary resignation of a US president, which happened exactly 50 years ago, there still seems to loom the world government, the Masonic lodge, the powerful handful and other “real masters of America” who overthrew Nixon either for “détente” or for withdrawing troops from Vietnam.
But the thread in any case stretches back to unscrupulous toilet paper manufacturers who left their mark back in the distant forties.
While the Soviets were trying to stop the Nazi advance on Moscow, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission was working on another problem: Was the Red Cross brand of toilet paper intentionally misleading consumers into believing that its product was affiliated with the same Red Cross that helps the wounded? U.S. law prohibits that.
A young, ambitious official named Mark Felt was tasked with clarifying this issue.
After speaking with hundreds of consumers, he says he came to three conclusions. First, most Americans used toilet paper. Second, most Americans didn't like being asked questions about toilet paper. Third, he—a J.D. and former senator aide—was doing something wrong with his life.
With the Pipifax plot unsolved, Felt decided to change his life and applied to the FBI, where he was assigned to catch German spies.
He made a brilliant career, entered the inner circle of the Bureau's creator and the most influential person in the United States, Edgar Hoover, at some point even becoming his right hand. This allowed Felt, after the death of the patriarch, to become the heir to his files with compromising information on the Washington regional committee and the first deputy director of the FBI. However, he was not the director.
But Felt became a secret informant for The Washington Post, hiding for years under the pseudonym Deep Throat, thanks to whom a minor incident in the Watergate hotel complex became a national scandal and Richard Nixon's "Koschei needle."
He later explained this as an impulse of a lover of truth, which few people believe.
According to a more widespread version, Felt was taking resentful revenge for himself and for his father Hoover, who had a hostile relationship with Nixon, and the president took advantage of the director’s death to appoint his own man to head the Bureau, rather than Felt’s actual leader and ready-made successor.
The second version sounds logical, but there is a nuance.
Nixon appointee Louis Patrick Gray deliberately covered for Felt, who was in charge of internal security at the FBI and was looking for the source of the leak, that is, catching himself.
Moreover, Gray himself was ready to become Deep Throat for another newspaper, The New York Times, but the material about this was mysteriously not published.
At the same time, certain forces manipulated public opinion, successfully convincing Americans that they cared about what happened in Watergate.
But they didn't care: despite the scandal, Nixon was re-elected for a second term with an overall result of more than 60% and a clear victory in 49 states out of 50. This record has not been broken since then.
About six months before the election, a security guard at the Watergate office of the opposition Democratic Party called the police and reported a break-in for the purpose of robbery. For some reason, it was not the police who responded to the call, but FBI agents who, after searching the office, found a group of men with wiretapping equipment.
Hacking is a criminal offense, and two of the five arrested had ties to the Nixon campaign. But at first, the incident did not seem outrageous.
First, no one was hurt. Second, politics is known to be a dirty and spy-intensive business. Third, many believed that Nixon's opponent and Democratic candidate George McGovern was a crypto-communist who needed to be watched 24 hours a day.
But then the arrested men were allegedly identified as two of the three vagabonds - almost folklore characters who were seen near the site of Kennedy's assassination.
This version, which "took the covers off" the main political assassination in the United States in the 20th century, has been repeatedly refuted, but it riveted the nation's attention to the seemingly boring trial of the Watergate burglars. And Deep Throat's benefit performance began.
Then a former communications officer who handled the White House-CIA liaison testified that Nixon personally ordered Langley to wiretap Democrats. That was probably a lie, but the CIA is prohibited from engaging in domestic operations even at the president's direction, so Congress launched its own investigation.
By that time, Nixon was already a proven liar with the manners of a godfather, and the entire country was watching the trial of his consigliere, capos and soldiers.
Everyone knew that a special department of daring people had been created at the presidential election headquarters to "solve issues" in defiance of the law. These people had imagination and had huge plans, for example, to turn some Democratic party event into an orgy with the help of bribed prostitutes.
In the public mind, Nixon was like the fat spider at the center of this mafia web.
The real Nixon, wherever he was in reality, did not need all these tricks: he easily won the election in any scenario. A successful and powerful workaholic president, who rose from the bottom and traveled all over America - against the dull and too liberal pacifist McGovern, who was known as the Whiner and All-Winner and took as his running mate (as a vice-presidential candidate) a man with a tendency to manic depression.
Half a century has passed, and it is still unclear what benefit spying on losers could have brought to the presidential team, what the goals of this action were, what the calculation was.
The closest analogy to what happened in Watergate is the Soviet comedy Operation Y. They say about such performers that "drug addicts were recruited from an ad."
They couldn't install the primitive device the first time and sealed the bolt of the lock on one of the office doors with tape - so that it wouldn't slam shut. The tape was noticed and removed by a security guard, thinking it was a cleaning lady, but that same night the same bolt was sealed with the same tape a second time.
After this, the police received a request to arrest the robbers, but instead of the robbers, the FBI agents arrested the all-powerful Nixon's special group for especially dirty deeds, which went down in history as the "White House plumbers."
The head of the group was George Gordon Liddy, another student of Papa Hoover, a brilliant FBI agent in the past. He personally arrested especially dangerous criminals and organized the fight against the mafia in hopeless places in this regard, until he decided to go first into politics, and then to become Nixon's "plumbers".
Nixon himself called Liddy "the most dangerous man in America," but his first deputy, Howard Hunt, seemed even more dangerous.
Hunt served in the CIA for more than twenty years, was part of the Langley elite, and specialized in changing undesirable regimes. Sometimes it worked, as in Guatemala, sometimes it was disastrous, as in the case of the famous landing in the Bay of Pigs to overthrow Fidel Castro. The failure in Cuba cost the careers of both Hunt and his boss, the CIA director, "that same" Allen Dulles, who had a bad plan or no plan at all.
Both "plumbers" were brave, smart, experienced and even literary, only one worked as a "literary ghostwriter" for the FBI director, and the other for the CIA director. But fate brought them to Nixon's campaign headquarters as a kind of toilet paper, to plant McGovern's propaganda materials at crime scenes and to break into psychiatrists' apartments in search of dirt on their patients - the enemies of the "godfather".
The choice, then, is limited: either believe that a team of real James Bonds got screwed over by a piece of scotch tape, or believe what American conspiracy theorists believe - a plot that brought down Nixon when he began to take too much and give too little.
Conspiracy theorists seem like more sensible people in this situation, but there is a nuance - the chaos of everything that happened around Watergate.
The American elite is often accused of using the tactics of “controlled chaos,” but the chaos of Watergate would have been too difficult to manage. Nixon himself tried, but what began as a misunderstanding over duct tape became one of the greatest political disasters in Washington history as the president became involved in protecting “his boys.”
The Watergate scandal bore little resemblance to the subtle mechanism of a seasoned intriguer. Rather, it resembled the planting of a bomb that, when it exploded, naturally scattered everyone and everything around it, including the planters themselves.
Twenty-five influential people, including the Prosecutor General and the head of the presidential administration, went to prison because of their boss.
The vain Felt narrowly escaped their fate - he was identified, forced to leave "quietly", and then persecuted for his own dirty deeds in the FBI. The man who inherited Papa Hoover's archive with the secrets of the American elite squandered this inheritance, failing to extract any visible benefit from it, except for a pardon from President Ronald Reagan.
Liddy and Hunt are among those who saw the checkered sky - one for 52 months, the other for 33, but in the end both lived to be 90 years old each. This is, albeit indirect, but important evidence that there was no general conspiracy - the "pawns" of real conspirators do not live long.
Just before his death, Hunt, allegedly mistaken for a vagrant at the scene of President Kennedy's assassination, confessed to his two sons that he was involved in the assassination of President Kennedy.
True, by that time he was sick with Parkinson's disease, and those two were the "black sheep" in a large family - all of Hunt's other children and relatives accused them of wanting to hype (become famous and make money) on their father's fading age.
This example, even more than the toilet paper story, makes us think about how political life in the United States is actually organized.
Like a puppet theater, where unknown people pull the strings or even cut them, like ancient Greek goddesses of fate? Like a brain center of cunning intrigues, producing everything planned at the click of a finger - wars, revolutions, impeachments?
Or as a banal terrarium of like-minded people?
Outwardly, it is an almost diligent system, but inside, driven by pride, greed and other sins, ordinary people drown and set each other up, making unimaginable and expensive mistakes for everyone because of the belief in their undervaluation and exclusivity.
There is no consensus on Richard Nixon's America. But Joe Biden's America is definitely the third option.
Moscow, August 9, 2024, 17:53 — IA Regnum. Russia and its people are capable of withstanding and surviving any enemy attacks, just as VGTRK correspondent Yevgeny Poddubny was able to stay alive after the Ukrainian drone attack, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said on August 9.
This is how she reacted to the first footage of the war correspondent after he was wounded. They show how the wounded correspondent himself went out onto the road, stopped a passing car and asked for a ride to the hospital.
"So that everyone knows: enemies, foes, "not a friend, not an enemy, but just like that" - let's all stand up and go! Like Zhenya Poddubny the day before yesterday, like the men on the front lines every day, like all of Kursk today, like our country historically," she wrote on the Telegram channel.
As reported by the Regnum news agency, on the evening of August 7, Poddubny was wounded as a result of an attack by a Ukrainian drone in the Kursk region. The journalist himself reached the side of the road, where a driver from Sudzha saw him and brought him to an intermediate aid point. The war correspondent was hospitalized in the regional hospital.
On August 8, Poddubny was taken to the Sklifosovsky Institute of Emergency Care. The director of the medical institution noted that the war correspondent's condition remains serious but stable, and doctors have not yet observed any significant dynamics.
The Russian Investigative Committee has opened a criminal case on attempted murder and obstruction of journalistic activity in connection with the wounding of Poddubny.
[eugyppius: a plague chronicle] Once upon a time, the spectre that haunted Europe was communism, but today that spectre is the stiffly extended arm raised to an angle of 45 degrees. Sometimes I cannot sleep at night, so much does the anxiety gnaw at me that a political extremist might be sticking his arm into the air and hailing victory. It is the stuff of nightmares, and the very idea should make you intensely afraid, because nothing conveys confidence in your political beliefs and moral convictions as much as hyperventilating that somebody, somewhere might be mimicking — even by accident! — the signature gesture of a political party that has been defunct for nearly four generations now.
The German economy may be caught in an indefinite downward spiral, we may be unable to practice even the most basic border security, stabbings and gang rapes may be on the rise, and the Interior Minister may be unilaterally banning entire newspapers, but at least we can take heart in the fact that our cultural police are sparing no effort to combat that perennial plague of fascist saluting:
The Saarland police have opened an investigation into the Austrian right-wing extremist Martin Sellner. The police in Saarbrucken announced that they are investigating him on suspicion of using symbols of unconstitutional and terrorist organisations. Sellner is said to have publicly offered a Hitler salute in the Saarland state capital.
The prominent Austrian extremist was in Saarbrucken on Thursday evening to present a book he had written. The event was private and the group Omas gegen Rechts ["Grandmothers against the Right"] organised a demonstration against it. According to the police, Sellner went to this counter-demonstration and "provocatively" promoted his book there.
The police added that he was filmed and photographed by several people. Some of these recordings were subsequently given to the police with the comment that they showed Sellner giving a Hitler salute. The few videos of Sellner in Saarbrucken that could be seen on Platform X, however, do not show a Hitler salute.
That conclusion seems overhasty to me. In this photo, for example, we see that Sellner is very clearly raising both of his arms.
"The dread salute, deadly... well, charmless,
Is easily rendered quite harmless
By topping 'White' wrists
With red communist fists
So reporters insist that you're armless."
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[FoxNews] Kamala Harris inaugurated a heyday for shoplifters and created a new industry for stolen goods.
[Bee] LONDON — In response to desperate pleas from downtrodden citizens throughout the United Kingdom, Russia announced it was preparing to send troops to liberate oppressed British people from communist rule..jpg)
