[JohnKass] The young woman wasn’t thinking about what would happen to her as she walked through Chicago’s elite shopping district on the Magnificent Mile.
The world was beautiful. It was just after 2 p.m. on Monday. People were out, shopping, getting into the holiday season. She was walking, talking with a friend on a beautiful day. She is just 23-years-old, an airline flight attendant, and here’s what she wasn’t thinking about:
She wasn’t thinking about brain damage, or being in a coma at Northwestern Hospital. She wasn’t thinking of her family weeping through Thanksgiving.
I read about the savage crime at CWB Chicago, the indispensable crime web site. It was under the headline, "Charges filed, victim remains unresponsive following log attack on the Mag Mile"
I’ve put a link to the CWB Chicago story in the first sentence of this column. And I urge you to share it with your friends, especially now.
I’m a subscriber. Why? Crime is a major issue, when downtown real estate fails, the city will fail. And the metropolitan newspapers went woke years ago, around the time of the Black Lives Matter riots that destroyed downtown. The papers stopped caring about crime, even to the point of refusing to run police mug shots of suspects. They were afraid of being called racist. Like other important institutions, the papers neutered themselves. I know. I was there.
Downtown has never recovered. I took the lede image from the website with permission from CWB Chicago managing partner Tim Hecke, who wrote the riveting story about the attack.
That young woman had everything in front of her, right there in front of the Burberry Store, 633 N. Michigan Avenue. I loved that store. I worked for 40 years on Boul Mich, when that store was an island of civility, a store that still speaks to excellent, classic British good taste and tradition.
That’s when the violent savage, reportedly a career criminal by the name of Bruce Diamond, made his move.
Yes, a savage. She didn’t know him. He came at her unprovoked to ruin her life. He rushed at her impulsively, without thought, in a completely savage act. Please don’t play the politically correct snowflake with me. If we can’t name the thing, then how can we responsibly deal with it, like adults? I use the word only based on his behavior. It was incredibly savage.
His weapon was a thick log that he threw at her "like a javelin," as she chatted with her friend, police and witnesses said. She never saw him coming. He used that log, taken from a holiday display outside a local Starbucks. It was about 3 feet long and a witness said it was thick about, 8 to 10 inches in diameter.
He used it to smash her in the face. He threw it at her head from a short distance away. He just walked up and unleashed on her. She went down. Immediately. Police saw it happen.
There was blood running from her ears and her nose. As I write this, she is still in intensive care unresponsive, as the chattering idiots of local TV news are doing their happy-talk bit, excited about the Michigan Avenue "Festival of Lights" parade. When I was a boy it was called the Christmas parade. But that was deemed offensive to some. It got in the way of commerce. Now it is a holiday festival of lights, with minor celebrities and politicians waving to the crowd of shoppers.
She wasn’t one of them.
The happy-talk TV journos were too preoccupied with satisfying their bosses and advertisers to bother mentioning the 23-year-old flight attendant hit in the face with the log or worry about her family or her friends.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
11/21/2023 09:47 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[17 views]
Top|| File under:
[PJ] By now, you've heard about political cartoonist Michael Ramirez and his cartoon about Hamas using innocent civilians as human shields. The Washington Post took it down after pressure from the left; editor David Shipley had the gall to say that the paper made the decision in the interest of "understanding the bonds that hold us together."
Ramirez's case is just the latest — and probably the most egregious — example of how censorship is rampant in our culture today. We're used to social media outlets and search engines censoring "unacceptable" opinions, but the federal government is amping up its efforts to combat "disinformation," which we all know means information and opinion that diverts from the Biden administration's talking points.
There's a new poll from Issues & Insights and TIPP Insights that provides us with some fascinating information about Americans' attitudes toward government and Big Tech censorship. The poll of 1,400 adults shows that 43% of Americans disapprove of censorship (26% "strongly" and 17% "somewhat"), while 36% approve of censorship (evenly divided between "strongly" and "somewhat").
Those results are awfully close, but when you dig deeper, you'll see some interesting trends. I&I's Terry Jones writes that "the relative closeness of the response is deceptive. When broken down by demographics and political affiliation, surprisingly sharp differences between and within different groups emerge."
That's putting it mildly. Democrats overwhelmingly approve of government and Big Tech gatekeepers reining in unapproved opinions. A whopping 57% of Democrats surveyed are down with censorship, with 35% strongly approving. Only 25% of Democrats disapprove.
[Economist] Javier Milei, Argentina’s newly elected president, rose to fame by bashing the country’s political class on television. Now the world’s first avowedly libertarian leader will probably demonstrate the truth of the notion that it is easier to criticise than to do.
On November 19th, Mr Milei surpassed expectations and won 56% of the vote in the presidential run-off, compared with 44% for Sergio Massa, a stalwart of the Peronist movement, which has governed Argentina for 28 of the past 40 years. His coalition, Liberty Advances, won in 20 of Argentina’s 23 provinces, plus the city of Buenos Aires.
In his victory speech, Mr Milei promised to make "drastic changes" to end Argentina’s century-long decline and return the country to being a "world power" within 35 years.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Sofia Kapanina
[REGNUM] Every time I read another initiative to increase the birth rate in our country, I want to facepalm myself. When I read reviews of these initiatives, I feel like I’m in the series “The Handmaid’s Tale.”
In accordance with prophesy. Or anyone conversant with the history of epidemiology.
[Alex Berenson] Sometimes the answer just needs to be color-coded.
For years, mRNA advocates have tried to give the jabs credit for ending the pandemic, despite massive evidence they stopped working within months and the observational data showing lower deaths among the vaccinated is hopelessly biased.
But earlier this month, the Society of Actuaries released an updated report on deaths during the pandemic that shows what really slayed Covid.
Spoiler alert: it didn’t come from Pfizer or Moderna.
NOT 404-File Not Found
[Jpost] Unit 504’s goals tend to be less big-picture strategic than the Mossad and the Shin Bet and pertain more to ongoing military operations.
After the 1973 Yom Kippur War disaster in which IDF Intelligence took the lead for the blame in failing to foresee that Egypt and Syria would launch a surprise attack on Israel, the government started to more significantly empower the much smaller Shin Bet and Mossad.
The idea was that more voices with more analytical and intelligence-gathering tools were needed so that even if one agency missed a large threat because of groupthink and being stuck in obsolete assumptions, one of the other agencies would think differently and catch the threat.
For decades – or at least until October 7 – this probably worked well, encouraging more debate and diverse views among Israeli intelligence agencies.
At one point, these changes meant that both the Mossad and the Shin Bet were heavily involved in Lebanon, even as Unit 504 had been deeply involved in Lebanon for a long time.
At a later point, however, the Mossad became more focused on Iran and international terrorism.
Likewise, at some point, the Shin Bet developed a greater expertise in Gaza.
UNIT 504 BACK DOWN SOUTH
What all of this meant was that at some point, Unit 504 took larger responsibility for Lebanon, while the Mossad, which always was supposed to have a more global focus, left Lebanon more to Unit 504.
As it became more focused on Lebanon, Unit 504 left more of the human spying work in Gaza to the Shin Bet, even if IDF Intelligence continued to use a variety of technological and aerial surveillance tools to gather intelligence.On Monday, Unit 504 announced that this change had been reversed.
As soon as the terrorist attack on October 7 hit, Unit 504 built a makeshift southern headquarters, doubled the size of its ranks, and reinvested deeply into Gaza.
Unit 504’s goals tend to be less big-picture strategic than the Mossad and the Shin Bet, and they pertain more to ongoing military operations.
This means that Unit 504 might question many arrested Palestinian terrorists or sympathetic Palestinian civilians with little to no preparation on the front lines in an effort to help troops on the same block advance the next few blocks, while avoiding ambushes and booby-traps.
In contrast, the Shin Bet is more likely to spend a longer period of time recruiting sources, and it is more likely to interrogate detainees at its secure facilities, to acquire bigger-picture strategic information.
The Shin Bet and Unit 504 do sometimes overlap in handling intelligence issues with some of the countries on Israel’s borders. But even as it has grown over the past 50 years, the Shin Bet is known for being able to specialize more for unusually complex missions, while Unit 504 is known to be able to bring a larger critical mass of operatives and human resources to address a threat or problem.
Meanwhile, the Mossad has also gotten much larger than it once was, and it runs agents, intelligence gathering, and operations across the globe, with a special focus on Iran.
Still, when a larger number of combat operations personnel are needed for a covert operation, Unit 504, along with some other IDF special forces units, is likely to at least supplement the Mossad, even sometimes beyond its standard envelope.
Another interesting move in the current war has been using Unit 504 to warn and help evacuate Palestinian civilians in Gaza. The unit performed very well in Syria during the 2010s to help convince anti-Assad-regime forces and other Syrian civilians to avoid friction with the Jewish state.
Will Unit 504’s reestablishment in Gaza lead to a larger postwar role, especially given that the Shin Bet and other IDF technological intelligence units missed Hamas’s invasion plans?
On the other hand, leaked intelligence to date has indicated that a minuscule number of Hamas leaders – only at the very top – knew the full scale of the terrorist group’s October 7 plans, so maybe Unit 504 would not have helped.
Still, the public will demand changes to the intelligence establishment once probing the war’s failures begins, and Unit 504, which was clearly not involved, may get another shot at being in the spotlight.
[NYP] Hamas used Gaza City’s Shifa hospital as a base of terror operations. That’s the obvious conclusion following Sunday’s discovery of a large terror tunnel under the hospital along with videos of Hamas bringing Israeli hostages inside.
Now comes an important question for Congress: Which US-funded international organizations knew the truth about Shifa and helped Hamas conceal its war crimes?
The Israel Defense Forces this weekend discovered a tunnel beneath Shifa hospital that extends 10 meters down and 55 meters across — leading to what might be a booby-trapped door. Special units that specialize in handling explosives have been summoned to break through to the next section.
Meanwhile, Israel also released security footage showing two hostages brought through Shifa by Hamas terrorists following the Oct. 7 massacre as hospital workers looked on — suggesting a widespread conspiracy to conceal both the presence of hostages at Shifa and Hamas’ terror infrastructure within the compound.
[News With Views] The FBI was caught with a memo authorizing surveillance of traditional Catholics but FBI director Christopher Wray disavowed the memo. We now understand that the assignment was subcontracted to Pope Francis, who just sacked a conservative Bishop in Texas. This does far more damage to the Catholic Church than anything the FBI could do.
On Sunday, November 12, as Catholics were reading the Gospel message about the need to avoid falling asleep "for you know neither the day nor the hour" of Christ’s return, many were waking up to learn that Texas Bishop Joseph E. Strickland was fired from his post. Strickland, an advocate of traditional Catholic teachings, was removed from his duties in the diocese of Tyler, Texas.
Strickland was NOT caught in a sex scandal, and his Tyler, Texas, diocese did not have to go bankrupt because of sex scandal payouts to victims. Instead, he was accused of criticizing the pope.
"The only answer I have to that," referring to his removal, "is because forces in the Church right now don’t want the truth of the Gospel," he said.
If this is the case, then what explains the direction of the Vatican under Francis? What is his agenda if not the Gospel of Christ?
One answer may lie in the report by conservative Bill Donohue of the Catholic league that, on October 17, Francis "welcomed Catholic dissidents who have previously been condemned by U.S. cardinals and bishops. He met for almost an hour with Sister Jeannine Gramick, who, along with Fr. Robert Nugent, founded New Ways Ministry (NWM) in 1977; it is a radical pro-homosexual group."
What is more, says Donohue, Gramick "was best friends with the most notorious serial child rapist priest in American history, Fr. Paul Shanley."
While homosexual activism is being embraced by the Vatican, the pope has remained silent about the case of Mark Houck, a Catholic father of seven children who was arrested at gunpoint by dozens of FBI agents in front of his weeping children for allegedly violating a federal law restricting pro-life protests. Houck, who was acquitted, is suing the Biden administration’s Department of Justice (DOJ) and seeking $4 million in damages for his dramatic arrest.
Strickland had been under attack by the Vatican for protesting providing Holy Communion to pro-abortion politicians such as Joe Biden.
Newsmax reported that Bishop Strickland "has been at odds with Francis’ far-left changes and pronouncements, some of which directly contradict the ancient faith’s core Christian beliefs. Recently Francis has suggested priests can bless same-sex unions, even though the church has long held that any sexual relations outside of marriage is sinful. And this week the Vatican indicated transgender individuals could be baptized and serve as godparents."
#1
Awful as Francis is, he can cite documents of Vatican II (a real ecumenical council that the Catholic church regards as authoritative) for just about everything he is doing.
The Council was the huge turning point for the Catholic church. It was amusing to watch John Paul II and Benedict try to pretend it never happened. But it did, and Francis is just following the precepts it laid down.
Posted by: Tom ||
11/21/2023 11:52 Comments ||
Top||
Direct Translation via Google Translation. Edited.
Text taken from a post at boosty.to/
[ColonelCassad] The situation in the city of Deir ez-Zor at the beginning of the fighting for Huwayja Katya had changed significantly compared to the beginning of autumn 2017. By this time, the heavy blockade of the Deir ez-Zor garrison, which had lasted three and a half years, had been broken. A key role in the liberation of areas of the city and nearby suburbs was played by a detachment of Russian military specialists, called the Wagner PMC.
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.
[JohnKass] The young woman wasn’t thinking about what would happen to her as she walked through Chicago’s elite shopping district on the Magnificent Mile.
[News With Views] The FBI was caught with a memo authorizing surveillance of traditional Catholics but FBI director Christopher Wray disavowed the memo. We now understand that the assignment was subcontracted to Pope Francis, who just sacked a conservative Bishop in Texas. This does far more damage to the Catholic Church than anything the FBI could do.
