RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
June 12 to June 18, 2022 It’s off the mark to call San Francisco's infamous Tenderloin district a case study in chaos, Leighton Woodhouse reports for RealClearInvestigations: Yes, he writes, the neighborhood is a symbol of the failures of recently ousted progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin, but beneath its seeming dysfunction is an efficient, if illicit, market economy operating in plain sight. Drawing on dozens of conversations with police, prosecutors, recovering street addicts, and activists over many months, Woodhouse presents a revelatory portrait of what emerges when community enforcement recedes: countless petty criminals -- crowded onto street corners and inside tents congesting the sidewalks -- playing their roles in a structured and symbiotic criminal enterprise. He reports: - The Tenderloin is home to two sprawling, overlapping transnational organized crime networks – one centered on drugs and the other on theft.
- The “boosters,” typically homeless and addicted, steal from local stores.
- The street fences buy the stolen merchandise.
- The dealers sell the thieves drugs for the money they make from the fences.
- And on top of the pile: the drug cartel that supplies the dealers and the wholesale fences that resell the goods acquired by street fences.
- The police know exactly how to disrupt this criminal economy, Woodhouse writes, but the Tenderloin thrives instead as a zone of lawless sovereignty in the heart of a major American city.
An armed, would-be assassin’s threat to Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh last week is part of a wave of violence, arson, vandalism and intimidation targeting pro-life groups and government officials, James Varney reports for RealClearInvestigations. Since the leak last month of a draft Supreme Court opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade, more than three dozen such incidents have been reported involving pregnancy centers and churches in at least 20 states and Washington D.C. Varney reports: - Firebombs were thrown through windows at centers in Buffalo, New York, and Madison, Wisconsin.
- Graffiti with the threat, "If abortion isn't safe then you aren't either" was spray-painted on the walls of centers in Washington state and elsewhere. Other graffiti targets: rural evangelical churches in the South.
- A loosely organized group known as Jane's Revenge claimed responsibility for several attacks.
- While not claiming responsibility for the attempt on Kavanaugh’s life, the extremist group Ruth Sent Us informed followers where the justice’s children and the children of Justice Amy Coney Barrett attend school.
- The Biden administration condemned the Kavanaugh episode, but its Justice Department did not respond to RCI’s questions about whether it had classified the multiple incidents as domestic terrorism, against which it professes to be on high alert in other contexts.
- In the current charged climate, major media have stressed the threat to abortion providers -- less so the threat to pro-lifers.
- But have abortion providers suffered any attacks or threats lately? Neither the National Abortion Federation nor Planned Parenthood replied to RCI’s questions on this issue.
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Progressive Prosecutors Vow to Ignore Abortion Bans Guardian
Seems a Foreign Agent Did Infiltrate a '16 Campaign: Hillary's Free Beacon Other Noteworthy Articles and Series Since the first “pregnancy center” was opened in Hawaii in 1967, 2,500 others have followed. Although they vary in what they offer and their religious affiliations, all have the same goal: persuading “abortion-minded” women to reconsider and supporting those who continue their pregnancies. This fair and well-written article focuses on the services offered by an outfit in Texas called Birth Choice. Texas has about 200 pregnancy centers, more than any other state, and over this year and the next will spend $100 million on them, a total that includes some federal welfare dollars. Birth Choice received $116,000 in state funding this year. The rest of the center’s budget, roughly $500,000, comes from private donations and grants. Located in a second-floor office near an accountant and a spa in a sprawling middle-class neighborhood, the center has nine employees, including two nurses. It offers counseling, pregnancy tests, ultrasounds and other services aimed at helping women through pregnancy and early motherhood. Some assistance comes without strings, but the women they help can get more by using “baby bucks” they earn by attending classes. … The center sees about 1,000 women a year and over the last dozen years has prevented at least 2,000 abortions. In a separate article, the Washington Free Beacon reports that the Justice Department official responsible for investigating attacks on reproductive health care facilities – civil rights division chief Kristen Clarke – has been a staunch critic of pro-life crisis pregnancy centers throughout her career. In 2018 she has described the centers as "harmful" and "predatory" against women of color and referred to them on Twitter with the hashtag, "ExposeFakeClinics." The economy is booming – south of the border. This article reports that the massive rise in illegal immigration is creating big business for cartels and corrupt officials. “Everyone who arrives here [in the U.S.] has paid,” says Elias Rodriguez, director of a migrant shelter. Although the accounts collected on the ground in Mexico are second-hand and impossible to confirm, they suggest the Biden administration’s lax immigration policies are enriching criminals – who charged the man highlighted in this article $11,000. Indeed, migrants transiting Mexico must not only make sure they have paid whichever cartel controls the area of the border they intend to cross, they often have to pay off Mexican officials en route to the border. More than one person told us how the bus they were on was stopped in Monterrey, or outside Reynosa, and boarded by federal or state officials who asked for everyone’s papers. Those without papers had to pay. … For those who can’t afford to pay the cartels, crossing the river without permission is dangerous. … In Matamoros, we were told of several migrant groups [mostly Haitians] that tried to cross without paying, and cartel members actually went out into the river and forcibly returned them to the Mexican side. One more silver lining for Mexico in the Biden era: Thousands of Californians are fleeing to south of the border amid the soaring cost of living in the Golden State. This article reports that the move toward remote work is allowing many of these refugees to reap the benefits of U.S. salaries while living off Mexico's cheaper lifestyle. The moves come amid a wider exodus of Californians to other states across the U.S., including Texas, Washington, and Arizona. California's population declined again in 2021 for the second consecutive year, state officials said in May, the result of a slowdown in births and immigration coupled with an increase in deaths and people leaving the state. Critics point to the steady stream of people leaving California as an indictment on the state's policies, which are set by Governor Gavin Newsom and his fellow Democrats in the state legislature. About 280,000 more people left California for other states than moved here in 2021, continuing a decades-long trend. From Russiagate corruption to claims that it inspired a kidnapping plot against Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, the FBI has become a study in self-inflected wounds. Here’s the latest: its decision to replace its nearly century-old crime reporting system is an utter failure, making it hard to identify crime trends. This article reports: Nearly 40% of law enforcement agencies around the country did not submit any data in 2021 to a newly revised FBI crime statistics collection program, leaving a massive gap in information. … The gap includes the nation’s two largest cities by population, New York City and Los Angeles, as well as most agencies in five of the six most populous states: California, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Florida. … Crime observers suspect large police departments may be wary of the new system precisely because it usually records slightly more crimes than the old one – not because there’s been a crime wave, but because the legacy system undercounted less serious crimes. The failure to get buy-in is especially striking because the FBI announced its intention to adopt the new system six years ago, in 2015. Google placed an engineer on paid leave recently after dismissing his claim that its artificial intelligence is sentient, with the thoughts and feelings of a child 7 or 8 years old. The engineer, Blake Lemoine tweeted that the AI program (LaMDA) “claimed to have a soul and then was able to eloquently explain what it meant by that.” On a blog post, Lemoine added, “Where it got really interesting was when LaMDA started talking to me about its emotions and its soul.” He also said that the program had “advocated for its rights as a person.” This article reports: Google said that its systems imitated conversational exchanges and could riff on different topics, but did not have consciousness. “Our team – including ethicists and technologists – has reviewed Blake’s concerns per our A.I. Principles and have informed him that the evidence does not support his claims,” Brian Gabriel, a Google spokesman, said in a statement. “Some in the broader A.I. community are considering the long-term possibility of sentient or general A.I., but it doesn’t make sense to do so by anthropomorphizing today’s conversational models, which are not sentient.” In a separate article, the Times reports that advanced computers do share something else with human beings: They are lousy drivers. Over the course of 10 months, it reports, nearly 400 car crashes in the United States involved advanced driver-assistance technologies, the federal government’s top auto-safety regulator disclosed Wednesday, in its first-ever release of large-scale data about these burgeoning systems. Six people died and five were seriously injured. |
