Chicago’s leftist mayor cancelling gunshot detection contract because he’s beholden to his ideology

Posted: September 22, 2024 by John Ruberry in crime, News/opinion, opinion/news, politics
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Chicago’s mayor, Brandon Johnson

By John Ruberry

Chicago, in Brandon Johnson, has a leftist idealogue as its mayor. Not surprisingly, he’s failing. 

Take away his far-left beliefs, “Branjo” is a big empty suit, one tailored by his former employer, the radical Chicago Teachers Union.

As I discussed last week, Johnson was a backer of the Defund the Police movement, until after he made it to the runoff round of last year’s mayoral election.

Johnson’s approval rating is 25 percent. Crime was the biggest issue of the 2023 campaign. While murders are down slightly, the crime numbers remain horrible. People don’t feel safe, despite the minimalizing of lawbreaking by Chicago’s weak-kneed media.

Despite 33 of Chicago’s 50 alderpersons voting to continue the city’s contract with ShotSpotter, a gunfire detection system deployed in high-crime areas, Branjo is putting ShotSpotter on mute. 

While there are critics of ShotSpotter on the left and right, the general belief of people possessing open minds–meaning people aren’t extreme left-wingers–is that ShotSpotter works. A University of Chicago Crime Lab study said that there is a “3-in-4 chance that the technology saves about 85 lives per year.”

Besides those 33 alderpersons, Chicago’s two major daily newspapers, the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune–both liberal publications–favor keeping ShotSpotter. As does Johnson’s pick for police superintendant, Larry Snelling.

Branjo has never explained why, other than fulfilling a campaign promise, his reasons for dumping ShotSpotter. Last week, Chicago’s man-child mayor dismissed ShotSpotter as “walkie-talkies on a stick.”

ShotSpotter, until Sunday night that is, is deployed in 12 of Chicago’s 22 police districts. The problem for Johnson and his far-left cop-hating base is that those districts are minority-majority. However, most of the alderpersons representing those areas voted to keep in ShotSpotter in place. The core of the support for cancelling ShotSpotter in the City Council are alderpersons–some of them are openly socialist–from progressive white wards on the North Side who put Johnson over the top in last year’s election.

This afternoon on X, Silvana Tabares, who represents a Southwest Side ward. bashed Johnson’s shortsightedness.

Experts and community member all know ShotSpotter provides a vital tool for first responders to render aid to victims of gun violence.

Beginning tonight, every gunshot victim bleeding in the streets of our city will be a worth sacrifice in the eyes of our mayor for his radical agenda.

Every single one.

Here are some headlines about ShotSpotter from CWB Chicago in just the last three days:

Branjo’s inner circle is comprised of fellow leftists. Earlier this month, on the Fran
Spielman Show podcast, a moderate downtown alderperson, Brian Hopkins, ripped the mayor.

“When you’re a democratic socialist who has some very extreme, left-wing views, that closes off a lot of opportunities to grow relationships with centrists or even moderate Republicans,” Hopkins said. “The city is suffering from that.”

A couple of, well, normal people were part of Johnson’s core staff early in his administration. Rich Guidice, the mayor’s first chief of staff, resigned his spring and he was replaced by a left-wing radical, Cristina Pacione-Zayas. Earlier this month, an office reshuffling ended up with an experienced and respected intergovernmental affairs officer, Sydney Holman resigning. Now in charge of lobbying the City Council and state legislators for Branjo is another extremist, Kennedy Bartley, who called police officers “f*cking pigs” in a 2021 podcast.

Chicagoans are only 16 months into Johnson’s four-year term as mayor.

As Barack Obama once said, “Elections have consequences.”

More murder victims will be one of those.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

…And Democrats in Favor of Dead Trumps

Posted: September 21, 2024 by datechguy in culture
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Yesterday I pointed out that those who are complaining about the Grim Beeper attack; that is targeted attack on Hezbollah members who have been hitting Israel with rockets for 11 months aren’t in favor of peace, they’re just pro terrorists.

Now yesterday Bill Maher accidently demonstrated that his friends on the left are in favor of Murdering Donald Trump to wit:

To Maher’s credit he scolds his audience but they still keep laughing at the prospect of Trump being murdered (To be fair the joke at the end was good, I’m of the belief that there is practically no subject that one can’t joke about).

I’ve said this once and I’ll say it again, if I was still a democrat I’d think twice about normalizing political assassination in a country that is both:

  1. Full of guns
  2. Where the best armed people in said country are your political foes

And if I’m the media I’m doubly not pushing this because the only people hated by the right more than democrat pols are the media, who are much easier targets.

Call me old fashioned but as a Catholic I not only state that murder is wrong but I submit and suggest the whole concept of life being sacred and Thou Shalt not Murder is rather useful for a society to have it it wants to function and I’d like my sons to live in a society that has this belief.

Hey if the left wants a post Christian society and so if they want to reject those principles that’s on them but while one can reject principles, one can’t reject reality and as scripture teaches he who sows the wind will reap the whirlwind.

That’s not a belief, that’s just fact.

Closing thought: I’m old enough to remember when the idea that you would complement someone for not approving of political murder would have not been necessary.

I very much prefer the Heinleinian universe over the Asimovian universe

Posted: September 19, 2024 by Jon Fournier in Uncategorized
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I recently finished reading the entire Foundation series by Isaac Asimov, all fifteen novels.  It has been several decades since I last read these masterpieces of Science Fiction.  When I read them previously I enjoyed them.  This time around I rather despised the entire lot. 

The writing is great and the science fiction is first rate, as good as I remembered it to be.  In the intervening decades since I last read these novels my political views evolved radically.  After reading several hundred books on politics and government I became a Libertarian. 

Unfortunately Isaac Asimov chose to cram the entire Foundation series full of the worst kind of collectivist refuse imaginable.  Collectivism was the central theme of the series.  Continuously Asimov denigrated individualism and praised collectivism.  At the climax of the final novel one character alone chooses a path that transforms the entire galaxy, and every one of the four quadrillion humans, into a single hive organism.

Ever since I was in high school I have been a huge fan of the author Robert Heinlein.  As my political awakening progressed my appreciation for Heinlein increased.  It is now an obsession. That is because Robert Heinlein was a Libertarian in the truest sense of the world.  A love for individualism and a hatred for collectivism is woven throughout most of his novels. This began with the short story Lifeline, which was the first thing he wrote, and continued through his last novel, To Sail Beyond the Stars.

Robert Heinlein was an exceptionally talented writer who wrote superb science fiction, with an emphasis on hardcore science.  His works are so great they can be read over and over again. 

The United States is such a mess because progressives have transformed this nation from a Constitutional Republic based on individualism into a collectivist hell.  Heinlein warned us about the evils of collectivism while Asimov praised collectivism.   

Paging Hezbollah: Not Anti-War Just in Favor of Dead Jews

Posted: September 19, 2024 by datechguy in Israel, middle east
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Almost from the moment of the Oct 7th attack last year a wave of leftists both internationally and in the US started warning Israel against retaliating against the people who accomplished the greatest mass murder of Jews since the Nazi death camps.

When Israel went into Gaza they warned them against targeting “civilian” targets and despite Israel accomplishing the lowest ratio of civilian causalities in a war zone continually attacked them as committing “genocide” despite the fact that they could have leveled Gaza without risking troops if they had so chosen.

And when Hezbollah fired rockets into Israel unabated to the point where over 100,000 Israeli citizens had to be evacuated from their homes and months later still have not returned those same folks said Israel must not hit back due to the risk of civilian causalities.

So now Israel has pulled off the seemingly impossible. They have managed to target Hezbollah operatives with an attack so precise that short of being a passenger in a car driven by one of the exploding terrorists practically the only way to have collateral casualties would be for one of these terror guys to be having sex with you with his clothes on and his pager in his pocket.

And what is the reaction to the largest counter terror attack in history with the fewest amount of innocents harmed in the process in history by those people who supposedly abhor risks to innocents?

Condemnation down the line.

Let’s be blunt, these folks aren’t anti war, they’re just on the terrorists side and want dead Jews.

And in my opinion if they manage to achieve the extermination of the Jews they won’t stop there

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