Chicago has most of the tools already to fight violent crime without additional federal help

Posted: July 25, 2021 by John Ruberry in crime, culture, media, News/opinion, politics
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

By John Ruberry

Another federal crackdown on guns in Chicago is coming. Just like in 2017 when the Chicago Crime Gun Strike Force was created by the federal government. Obviously it didn’t work well–because here we are in 2021 coping with out of control violent crime in America’s third-largest city.

According to Hey Jackass here are Chicago’s recent homicide and shooting totals:

Year       Homicides  Wounded
2021 
(to date)   443        2,023
2020	    456	       1,902
2019	    303	       1,307
2018	    338	       1,433
2017	    425	       1,813
2016	    414	       2,050
2015	    283	       1,358
2014	    243	       1,227

Already as you can see more people have been wounded so far this year than in any year since 2014, with the exception of 2016. And there have been more homicides–the totals comprised by Hey Jackass include other deaths, such as self-defense shootings–than any year except 2020, when there were 456 homicides. We’re already at 443 with a little more than five months left in 2021.

“2020 did have a lot of shootings in it,” Saniie said. “But it’s also important to put this into perspective.”

Here’s your perspective, Saniie: As I wrote earlier in this entry, violence is out of control in Chicago. A few weeks ago I wrote, correctly of course, “Chicago has a street gang problem not a gun problem.” There are ten gang members for every cop in the city. But let’s talk about guns. Chicago has among the strictest gun laws in America. Oh, don’t believe the long-time apologists’ line that guns from out of state are responsibile for this, or previous, violent crime waves. David Harsanyi ripped that pathetic argument to shreds last year in the National Review. And of course those out of state guns don’t fire themselves.

Chicago has plenty of other laws on the books to fight crime. But Kim Foxx is not a forceful prosecutor. The essential website CWB Chicago, unlike the city’s mainstream media outlets, honestly reports on Chicago crime and holds no punches. Since New Year’s Day it has been documenting the people in Chicago “accused of killing, trying to kill, or shooting someone in Chicago this year while awaiting trial for another felony.” Many of those earlier crimes involve guns. So far CWB Chicago has found 30 such individuals.

According to the same site, 32 people “were charged with committing murder, attempted murder, or aggravated battery with a firearm while free on bail for serious felonies in 2020.”

I don’t have any firm numbers on people in Chicago charged with new felonies while on electronic surveillance because I can’t find any. Perhaps the Chicago Sun-Times, which deems itself “the Hardest Working Paper in America,” or the Chicago Tribune, both of which have greater resources than internet stand-alones, can find out how many ankle-bracelet offenders there are if they put forth the effort. Perhaps such work can reverse their long decline in revenue and subscribers. But alas, both newspapers have a narrative to advance. A false one when it comes to crime.

Even though she is a leftist ideologue like Foxx, Chicago’s mayor, Lori Lightfoot, is not politically close with the Cook County state’s attorney. They may even hate each other. But on the issue of crime they are in lockstep. Last week Lightfoot said Chicago “can’t arrest its way” of of its violence crisis.

Perhaps she is right. But Chicago–and Cook County–can jail and imprison its way, at least for now, out of its violent crime outbreak. But that probably won’t happen. Last month Foxx said that she might drop many low-level charges–her office hasn’t said which alleged crimes would be covered–because of a backlog of cases dating to the 2020 lockdown. Crime very well may pay in Chicago. Foxx is a supporter of “affordable bail.” Meanwhile Illinois’ no cash bail law goes into effect in 2023, two months after Gov. JB Pritzker, who signed that bill into law, faces voters. Al Capone and his henchmen picked the wrong ’20s decade to commit crimes, for sure.

Presumably Cook County judges and Foxx’s attorneys are well-rested from an easy 2020. They need to work harder and fulfil their duty to protect the public. Foxx can put on her lawyer hat and pitch in and help out in the courtroom, although if I was a criminal and she was the lead attorney against me I’d be confident of my chances for an acquittal.

While I’m sure federal assistance will help in fighting violent crime in Chicago, many of the tools are already in place for Lightfoot and Foxx to clean up Chicago now.

Only the Chicago Police Department needs to bring back stop-and-frisk searches, allow foot chases again, and reinstate its gang crimes unit, for starters.

John Ruberry regularly blogs from suburban Cook County at Marathon Pundit. And no, I did not vote for Kim Foxx.

Post Christian/Marxist Sore Thumbs in Science, Law, Tribalism, Truth and the Fruits of it All Under the Fedora

Posted: July 25, 2021 by datechguy in catholic, crime, culture, education, elections, News/opinion, politics, under the fedora, Vive L'Empereur
Tags: , , , , , , , ,

You don’t really understand the costs of a Post Christian society until it arrives here are a few thoughts on the subject.

The scientific community was once one of the most trusted communities in the country, because it was based on the process of observation, theory experimentation and results, that is truth. This is a Christian basic principle:

You will know the truth and the truth shall set you free.

John 8:32.

But once “science” became all about pleasing the money men or advancing an ideology, truth was not a goal and once that was recognized trust in scientific institutions disappeared.

Haven’t you ever wondered why so many totalitarian counties were behind scientifically or needed to steal secrets from the west? When truth is suborned to fear it’s hard to generate accurate results.

One of the most critical principles of Christianity is equality before God and equality before the law You shall not act dishonestly in rendering judgment. Show neither partiality to the weak nor deference to the mighty, but judge your fellow men justly. Leviticus 19:15 That was a radical idea when God gave this law to Moses and it was of the things that Jesus called out the Pharisees for:

The scribes and the Pharisees have taken their seat on the chair of Moses. Therefore, do and observe all things whatsoever they tell you, but do not follow their example. For they preach but they do not practice. They tie up heavy burdens (hard to carry) and lay them on people’s shoulders, but they will not lift a finger to move them.

Matt 23:2-4

The blatant double standards we have seen from Hunter Biden and his “Art” sales , to official flaunting the lockdown & mask rules they foist on others, to the treatment of rioters who burn cities vs those who sit on desks and take laptops enrages people. Furthermore the unwillingness to allow those who wish to actually enforce the law as written to do so in cities has led to the exodus of police and the turning of parts of those cities into ‘no go” zones.

The idea that an American could not walk safely in an American city is a concept that was so foreign in my youth that the tolerance of such things today completely puzzles me.

One of the basic principles of Judeo-Christian culture is the caring for others as yourself both in the Old Testament:

You shall not go about spreading slander among your kinsmen; nor shall you stand by idly when your neighbor’s life is at stake. I am the LORD.  

Leviticus 19:16

And the New

One of the scribes, when he came forward and heard them disputing and saw how well he had answered them, asked him, “Which is the first of all the commandments?” Jesus replied, “The first is this: ‘Hear, O Israel! The Lord our God is Lord alone! You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.“

Mark 12:28-31.

However the Marxist left biggest goals have been to divide us. Punish those who protect their neighbor, allow people to rob and steal. The good one one race isn’t the good of another. The law of one race is not the law of another. The damage this has caused is self evident, yet the realization that the reason this has been so easily accomplished has been the withdrawal of Christian principles of society is not. Nothing better illustrates the bankruptcy of a society then when we decided it was licit and even proper to not lift a finger when other is beaten before us.

The audits have been the best example of another Christian Principle that has been completely suborned:

A good tree does not bear rotten fruit, nor does a rotten tree bear good fruit. For every tree is known by its own fruit. For people do not pick figs from thornbushes, nor do they gather grapes from brambles.

Luke 6:43-44

Our friends on the left insist that the last election was on the up and up but then do all they can to suppress not only the audits of these count and ballots, audits that would supposedly verify their claims, but suppress any that might question then online, why because the truth is not valued. Their reaction and the “Cancel Culture they promote” is no different than the reaction of the crowd to St. Stephen, the 1st of the Martyrs who called out his accusers by their own history and they killed him for it:

But they cried out in a loud voice, covered their ears, and rushed upon him together. They threw him out of the city, and began to stone him. The witnesses laid down their cloaks at the feet of a young man named Saul. As they were stoning Stephen, he called out, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.” Then he fell to his knees and cried out in a loud voice, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them”; and when he said this, he fell asleep.

Acts 7:57-60.

They are creating digital Martyrs although we have not yet reached the point where they are killing us, well except for Ashli Babbitt whose name must not be mentioned by media but whose mother got a standing ovation at yesterday’s Trump rally.

I suspect this martyrdom will have the same results on the voting community as the church’s martyrs did on the spread of Christianity.

Finally the most destructive of these things has had it seeds planted for the last several decades, the denial of the value of Fatherhood and of discipline:

Besides this, we have had our earthly fathers to discipline us, and we respected them. Should we not (then) submit all the more to the Father of spirits and live? They disciplined us for a short time as seemed right to them, but he does so for our benefit, in order that we may share his holiness. At the time, all discipline seems a cause not for joy but for pain, yet later it brings the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who are trained by it

Hebrews 12:9-11

And instead we gave trophies to those wo did not achieve, we indulged when we should not have and we refused to say no. We were warned of the fruits of this in scripture as well:

He who spoils his son will have wounds to bandage, and will quake inwardly at every outcry. A colt untamed turns out stubborn; a son left to himself grows up unruly. Pamper your child and he will be a terror for you, indulge him and he will bring you grief. Share not in his frivolity lest you share in his sorrow, when finally your teeth are clenched in remorse. Give him not his own way in his youth, and close not your eyes to his follies.

Sirach 30: 7-11

The result, we are not only at the point where are children are unsure of what they are, afraid of everything, led like sheep but even worse we are actually giving these kids the right to decide on destructive surgery that will scar them forever and going after their parents if they object!

All of this comes from the rejection of God, the idea that there is nothing greater than themselves and what they feel at any given moment. This is ironically but not surprisingly the very 1st temptation of the Devil to mankind:

But the serpent said to the woman: “You certainly will not die! No, God knows well that the moment you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods who know what is good and what is bad.”

Genesis 3:4-5

It is the primary lie that those who for years told us not to make the cultural fight to protect their own advancement that got us here. Jesus knew these types implicitly & called them out:

Why do you not understand what I am saying? Because you cannot bear to hear my word. You belong to your father the devil and you willingly carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in truth, because there is no truth in him. When he tells a lie, he speaks in character, because he is a liar and the father of lies.

John 8:43-44

The saying goes when you don’t believe in God you’ll believe in anything from people being able to change their sex and gender at will to dark magic as a solution to problems

This was the endgame, and it was always the endgame from the very start, but you couldn’t get to this endgame without creating a post Christian society.

For the love of all that is good, get off the cloud!!

Posted: July 24, 2021 by ng36b in Uncomfortable Truths
Tags: , , , , ,
What could possibly go wrong? From Dilbert.

For the love of everything holy, please, please, please, get your data out of the cloud.

For years now we have been sold on “cloud” technology. Everything will be in the “cloud.” We just move things to the “cloud” and it’ll be great! Cloud computing is the bestest thing ever!!!

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. And in the age of advanced censorship from large media companies, really, really wrong.

The “cloud” is not a hard concept. Put data on a remote computer with a fast connection, so that as long as you have an internet connection you can access the data. On the surface, that seems like a good thing. It’s not, and especially isn’t for anyone that has even a remotely conservative opinion. Why are there problems?

  1. You don’t own your data. Cloud services can use your data for whatever they want. Simply scroll through the terms of service to prove my point.
  2. Cloud services can cancel you at any time. You lose access to your data instantly. You can’t even find the address for the place your data is being stored at, so how do you think you’ll get it back?
  3. You upload more than data. Your data, your location when you upload, the IP address you upload from, all of that goes to the cloud too.

Large media companies continue to prove they have an agenda and are 100% willing to push it. What hurt Parler the most was losing access on Amazon Web Services. AWS is huge, and a large chunk of the internet revolves around using it as a host. Having AWS simply drop a client as big as Parler was unheard of before, but its going to become the norm.

What’s the alternative? Build your own cloud.

QNAP TS-451, from QNAP

Having a network attached storage, or NAS, used to be a thing only geeky kids setup to host their Minecraft server. It used to be fairly complicated to build and maintain. Not anymore. Companies like QNAP and Synology makes NAS devices that are easy to setup, easy to use, and easy to maintain privacy. You can store your pictures, videos, e-mail and everything else without worrying what Facebook thinks of it. These devices even let you safely access them remotely. And with basic models costing as little as 139 dollars, its even a more long-term economical option.

Just like dumping social media, dumping cloud services is going to happen at some point. One must ask, do you think so-called woke companies are going to be happy just censoring social media? Can one imagine a world where problematic pictures, letters, and other electronic media stored in the cloud simply vanish one day, or the files become “corrupted” for unknown reasons? That day is coming. It’s coming soon. Anyone conservative that is foolishly leaving private data in a cloud by choice is going to feel that wrath in less than five years.

There is no good reason to store your private data on a cloud. Unless you have to use one for work, buy a NAS and move off cloud services.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

Five Fr. Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill Thoughts Under the Fedora

Posted: July 24, 2021 by datechguy in catholic, Church doctrine, culture
Tags: , ,

The first thing one should take away from this story, particularly if you are a Non-Catholic who has no interest in what the good monsignor is doing in his spare time is this: The same tracking data that was used here is being used on you and you have almost certainly agreed to its use via the user agreement.

If that doesn’t scare you it ought to

My decision to stay off of Facebook and to do without a smartphone is looking better and better every day.

Forgetting the sinfulness of the actions of Msgr Burrill it really strikes me how stupid it is.

Even without this tracking business did he really think that this was going to be kept under wraps forever. Did he not think that with all the enemies that the church has that this would not have eventually been used against the church?

The idea that people think that stuff like this is never going to come out never ceases to amaze me, and I’ll bet there are plenty of people in the church who are very afraid right now.

They should be, particularly for their souls.

It is not lost on a lot of people that the Msgr. is from the same diocese where Fr. Altman has his priestly facilities to say the mass removed for daring to call out both the Bishops and Catholic pols for their open flaunting of the teaching of the church.

I suspect that unlike Fr. Altman Msgr Burrill will not face such a punishment or anything near it from his Bishop, unless he suddenly does something really beyond the pale like coming out against Traditionis custodes.

To nobody’s surprise the “Catholics for Mortal Sin” left as I call them is up in arms about the revelations citing privacy. Crisis Magazine and religion news both hit the messenger hard insisting that these sins were nobody’s business, but at least they referred to them as sins as opposed to Fr. James Martin to who the only sin in that the public was informed of something that I suspect an awful lot of people knew about, some I suspect with authority.

I have a question for these folks. If a priest was banging the wives of parishioners or was working at an abortion clinic under an assumed name, both acts completely legal in the US and elsewhere, would it not be proper to expose these acts?

I suspect their answers would vary depending on if the priests politics paralleled their own.

Speaking off souls what I find really interesting, as a person who struggles with sin, is the lack on concern about Msgr. Burrill’s soul. If these catholic actually believe in their vows and the doctrines of the Church they should be very interested in stopping mortal sins that can destroy a person’s soul.

Now in fairness there are some who are more interested in spiking the ball against their foes then the idea of worrying about both the Msgr’s soul and the souls of the men he was hooking up with. That’s the sin of pride.

We should be concerned with the souls of sinners as their are our brothers and the soul of the church because it is the instrument by which Christ redeems such sinners, Souls are all that matter, this should always remain the priority. Such things need to be exposed because the scandal they produce endangers souls, yet it is still our duty to be willing to show mercy once they are, “Blessed are the merciful for they shall be shown mercy” For we must remember as I’ve said many times that heaven will be no less glorious nor hell any more bearable if someone we despise is standing next to us there.

Older Entries
Newer Entries