Hirsch failed his Kobayashi Maru test. //

Zenit2008
5 hours ago
That the scammer used the name "Kobayashi" should have been a dead giveaway. Kobayashi Maru has been synonymous with "no-win situation" for >40 years.

Jeff S Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
15y
8,465
Subscriptor++
jandrese said:
This is actually somewhat impressive. 12,600 victims means each one was extorted for around $135, which seems like the amount of money you might expect an average 14-17 year old boy to have. That's an enormous amount of work on the scammers part. Day in and day out camming and scamming.
One of the things that often ends up being the case for groups committing organized crime is that, when you look at the hours worked to perpetrate the crime, most of the people in the crime ring don't get paid very well. The people at the very top of the gang usually make some decent money.

There have been a few studies on the economics of gangs primarily involved in drug dealing, and most of the people in the gang were making minimum wage or much less - despite taking enormous risks both legally, and the risk of getting shot or beat up or whatever by rival gangs or even your own gang if they decide it's time to 'fire' you.

On top of that, if the criminal enterprise has some success, there's a very real risk that as soon as you start making some money, now you gotta start paying out protection money to crooked cops, politicians, judges, etc.

Even that people at the top of the gangs topped out at around $130k annually, which would be a very good wage for a middle class professional, but really low for an 'executive management' person, which is the closest analog for those groups.

Makes you wonder why they don't get the idea if they are starting up what basically constitutes a business, to sell something legal instead.

There is no doubt that our criminal justice system is far from perfect. As someone whose name escapes me once put it, "It's not a system, and it has nothing to do with justice, but it is criminal." That said, sometimes the reason people draw long prison sentences for a very good reason that has nothing to do with systemic racism or bad lawyers.

We want to believe in rehabilitation and redemption, but we also have to realize that the patterns of behavior and personality traits that send a man to prison for several decades are rarely made better by incarceration. We should be surprised that a man who drew a 50-year sentence for violent crimes killed someone in the same way that we would be shocked that a poisonous snake bit someone. //

How much risk are we willing to inflict upon society so we can feel good about ourselves?

Carrie Severino @JCNSeverino
·
During a panel, DC residents voiced their frustrations and demanded accountability from city leaders in addressing the violent crime epidemic that's plaguing our nation’s capital.

DC Attorney General Brian Schwalb’s response: “We cannot prosecute and arrest our way out of it.”

2:46 PM · Jan 31, 2024 //

The forum was specifically addressing the issue of juvenile crime and juvenile carjackings, and this lawn flamingo of a prosecutor was looking at these residents and declaring that executing his assigned duties was not the solution. //

INTJ
28 minutes ago
"We cannot prosecute and arrest our way out of it."

Dude. That's the only way you're going to get out of it.

Skibum
12 hours ago
This situation is a great example of the Democrat superpower - the ability to blind voters to the impact of cause and effect. Democrats manage to never be held responsible for the consequences of their legislative actions. //

piscorman
13 hours ago edited
That is how politicians do it. They create a problem, blame it on the private sector, and create another government solution problem trying to "fix it".

X user MorosKostas wrote:

This is hilarious. Theft is so common in California that it happened right in front of Newsom, and when the cashier (who didn't realize it was Newsom) said they can't stop shoplifters due to the California government, Newsom got mad at her and asked to see the manager. //

Then Newsom said he questioned why he was spending $380 when everyone else walked right out.

How completely lacking in self-awareness is Newsom, that he doesn't seem to understand that this is going on. Employees in his state are being told not to bother with shoplifters like this because they wouldn't face any consequences.

Indeed, Newsom seems more upset about the worker blaming him for it than about the Democratic policies that have led to this problem (along with the liberal DAs that refuse to prosecute such cases). //

VoteGeneric
14 minutes ago
Newsome doesn't shop at Target. His housekeeper shops at Target.
Made up story for the press.

Wednesday, the grand jury "no billed" the shooter. //

Dieter Schultz
11 hours ago edited

I don't have a problem shooting a man's weight in lead at him to bring him down. In this case, I thought a solid, indestructible self-defense case was available for the first four rounds. The next four were decidedly in the "gray area" of legality. The ninth round, in my opinion, could, in the right lighting, be mistaken for an execution.

While I can see streiff's point, why is it OK to train cops to 'keep firing until the person is no longer a threat', and they won't get dinged for doing it, but we're willing to put a shot count on civilians that aren't trained like the police are?

I get the last shots may have been unnecessary and overkill, but with adrenaline flowing how do we place these, seemingly, higher standards on civilians? //

anon-608f Asurea
3 hours ago
I appreciate your testimony. However, I believe this philosophy is outdated. Why are we changing the responsibility from the thug to armed civilian? No. The thug was willing to kill them all for pennies. He forfeited his life the minute he began the encounter. The armed citizen should only be held to account their behavior before the encounter- once it starts all accountability should be transferred to the thug. No more armed citizens should be prosecuted for ending, however completely, deadly encounters they didn't begin. The way we're handling it now is cruel and unreasonable. You were just as likely to have shot a fleeing felon in the back and been imprisoned for it...after they invaded your home! It is a sick theory that only attorneys could come up with. //

We agonize over a thug who, milliseconds before, was preparing to kill a truly innocent person- they have no good will, their humanity is forfeit. And so they get shot.

Why are we ever going after the armed citizen for injuring or killing a worthless thug? Why are we holding them to standards even police are hard pressed to meet??!!

No. I say no. When certain situational and evidentiary thresholds are met (not hard in this age of digital recordings), we shouldn't care if a thug is shot in the face or in the back, or even if already fleeing in a car. They forfeited their humanity and the citizen had every right and responsibility to ensure that they weren't coming back. Because they do. They'll rob multiple places in a night so long as they meet no resistance. Letting them flee is NOT morally superior to shooting a feral thug while fleeing.
As far as I'm concerned, you don't stop shooting at a predator attacking the flock just because it runs, and I respect coyotes and wolves far more than felons.

I just think our moral philosophy is outdated. I'm not saying this should be the "wild west" and people are shot dead with no account, but I do believe the threshold for "justifiable" and "reasonable" ought to be lowered in self defense.

"Let's see," Reason magazine associate editor Billy Binion posted on X. "Some recent stats: Mississippi's gun homicide rate: ~13 murders per 100,000 people; Louisiana's gun homicide rate: ~15 murders per 100,000 people; Missouri's gun homicide rate: ~11 murders per 100,000 people; Chicago's gun homicide rate: ~29 murders per 100,000 people."

"Why do you pick just a couple of states to compare?" John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, posted on X. "Is that how public health researchers do research? Why don't you look at local crime rates where policing policies are determined and where DAs and judges are almost always selected?"

If you remove the blue cities from the red states, such as New Orleans, the murder rates tend to fall.

Zack Smith @tzsmith
Nov 29
·
State-level murder rates are highly misleading. As my @Heritage colleagues and I explained in our Blue City Murder Problem paper, crime is a localized phenomenon.

https://heritage.org/crime-and-justice/report/the-blue-city-murder-problem

And guess what? Remove the blue cities from the red states...and the murder rates fall.

Joe Scarborough @JoeNBC
Watch the Senator pretend that he didn’t just hear that his home state has higher death rates from firearms than Chicago. Then he blows past that reality and thinks that insulting a woman will make us forget…that his own state has higher death rates from guns than Chicago.
Zack Smith @tzsmith
·
As you can see from this table, take New Orleans' murder rate out, and Louisiana's murder rate falls by over 15%!

And take Chicago's murder rate out, and Illinois' falls by a shocking 55%!
3:24 PM · Nov 29, 2023 //

Clare Boothe Lucid
11 hours ago edited
Also note how gun control proponents often want to talk about the overall gun death rate which includes many suicides as well as some accidents along with homicides. Obviously suicides and accidents are important, too, but those are substantially different issues with different causes and potential solutions compared to homicides. One can see examples above…one person mentions death rates from firearms and another answers with homicide rates

Expanded Homicide Data Table 8
Murder Victims
by Weapon, 2015–2019

Gretchen Carlson @GretchenCarlson
·
Ordinary people didn’t have AR-15s before 2004. They’re not some time-honored American tradition, they’re a recent mistake that we could fix and save thousands of lives in the process.
Ben Shapiro @benshapiro
No, I Won’t Give Up My AR-15
Embedded video
Readers added context
“ For more than a half-century, the AR-15 has been popular among gun owners, widely available in gun stores and, for many years, even appeared in the Sears catalog.”

npr.org/2018/02/28/588…
Context is written by people who use X, and appears when rated helpful by others. Find out more.
12:05 PM · Oct 30, 2023 //

The debil Blue State Deplorable
3 hours ago edited
Also, the FBI reported around 364 deaths, in 2019 from rifles, all rifles not just ARs.
The same report showed 600 deaths from personal weapons (hands, fist, feet, etc.).
1476 deaths from knives and cutting instruments.
The report can be found here.
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-8.xls //

Public Citizen Blue State Deplorable
an hour ago
Lets not even try to compare the number of deaths and disabling injuries caused by drunk drivers with the firearms deaths.
I'm sure in the minds of the Bent Left the firearms deaths are Orders Of Magnitude greater, when in fact the opposite is the true picture. //

Robert A Hahn
2 hours ago
She's dumber than she looks. After getting ratioed to Hell and back, as outlined above, she came back with this doozy:

"In 1992, AR-15s composed 21 of every 100 guns made in the US. By 2020 almost 1 in 5 guns made were AR-15s."

Gretchen the Math Whiz. //

cupera1 Raoul Bilbao
4 hours ago
From 2019

• Twenty-eight people are killed every year by lightning.
• Roughly 2,167 Americans die annually from constipation.
• On average, 951 people are killed by their lawnmowers while another 4,193 are killed by farm tractors and other agricultural equipment.
• Murderous toasters kill 45 people per year.
• Eleven teenagers die every day while texting and driving.
• An estimated 40 people die every year while skateboarding.
• Roughly 10,206 are accidentally strangled to death while they sleep, and for those who survive the night, another 10,386 will die every year falling out of bed.
• As per the FBI, rifles of every variation — including but not limited to the scary AR-15 — killed 215 Americans in 2019. But another 1,533 were killed by knives, and 651 people were beaten to death by hands, fists, feet, etc.
• In 2015, 5,051 people choked to death while eating.
• Americans average 62 deaths per year by bees, wasps, and hornets.

President Joe Biden pushed for federal workers to return to their respective offices in August, but hundreds of bureaucrats assigned to work in the Speaker Nancy Pelosi Federal Building in downtown San Francisco were told to stay home “for the foreseeable future” to avoid the rising crime, violence, and drugs plaguing the plaza.

“According to its designer, the building was set up to represent ‘the way government should be and how the workplace should be,’” Ernst wrote in a letter to General Services Administration (GSA) Administrator Robin Carnahan. “Ironically, the Nancy Pelosi Federal Building is instead a symbol of the way government doesn’t work, with offices and workplaces largely empty due to drug and crime problems resulting from the misguided policies of the state and city governments.”

Built in 2007, the building was renovated thanks to millions of taxpayer dollars in 2021 and renamed after Pelosi thanks to an earmark in Democrats’ 2022 $1.7 trillion spending package. Nevertheless, it has become an abandoned symbol of the consequences of the unchecked crime that often plagues Democrat-run cities.