THE “ODD MIX” OF CHICAGO LOOTERS

The Chicago police arrested 43 people who participated in the looting spree along the city’s Mag Mile earlier this week. Who were these looters?

According to the Chicago Tribune, they were “an odd mix of peer-pressured college students, out-of-work parents, and convicted felons.” It would be interesting to know how much time the convicted felons had served, and for what crimes. Their looting could be another product of America’s under-incarceration problem.

Ostensibly, the looting was a response to a police shooting in the Englewood neighborhood. Yet, according to the Tribune, none of arrested looters was from Englewood.

In fact, no one who made a statement in court upon being arraigned even mentioned the incident. Not only was the police shooting a pretext for the looting, it was so far from the looters’ consciousness that they forgot to mention it.

The prevailing motive of this “odd mix” wasn’t “police brutality,” it was the desire to snatch free stuff and, at least some cases, to smash things. In other words, envy and resentment, not “social justice.”

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/08/the-odd-mix-of-chicago-looters.php

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America is becoming a nation of tattletales

By Andrea Widburg

One of the disturbing aspects of our five-month-long descent into Wuhan virus madness is that Americans are becoming a nation of tattletales. Too many people are responding with alacrity when their local government tells them to report their fellow citizens for violating executive orders of dubious practical or legal merit. We tend to think of tattletales in a negative light. In the schoolyard, being a tattletale is a social crime. Children instinctively feel that the tattler isn’t telling information to preserve the other children’s wellbeing. The tattling is, instead, one of the ways unlikable children ingratiate themselves with the adults in charge. At a more extreme level, totalitarian states deliberately create a climate of fear in which neighbors and even family members spy on each other to protect themselves. It is one of the vilest ways in which despots maintain power.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/08/america_is_becoming_a_nation_of_tattletales_comments.html#comments-container

from Comments:

LeoTheLion3h

The 2 dollar dictators are relying on two pronounced human weaknesses or flaws that exist in a great many people. The first flaw is that many people lack any real sense of meaning in their lives. I know this is perverse, but way too many people gain a sense of personal importance by snitching on their fellow human beings. This helps to temporarily alleviate their lack of true self-esteem which is gained by genuine personal accomplishment. The snitch feels he or she is accomplishing something by tattling on a fellow human being. The second flaw in a great many of today's Americans is their lack of understanding of the concept and philosophy of structured liberty. They see nothing wrong with government mandating that healthy people must stay at home, or wear masks in public. Washington. Jefferson, and Madison all realized there are places government must not go, if men are to live in liberty. They would be aghast at both what is being done at the state and local government levels in regards to this pandemic, AND to the ACCEPTANCE of the state and local governments' dictatorial actions by a large segment of the citizenry.

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McCormick Place hospital’s cost to taxpayers? $1.7 million per patient. How the deal happened.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s aides defend her push for little-used coronavirus hospital built by Walsh Construction as important ‘insurance policy’ at a time of ‘immense emergency.’

By Tim Novak and Robert Herguth Aug 14, 2020, 5:30am CDT

Taxpayers spent nearly $66 million fashioning McCormick Place into an emergency coronavirus hospital with 2,750 beds this past spring amid fears that COVID-19 patients would overwhelm hospitals in the Chicago area.
Those fears turned out to be unfounded. Just 38 patients were transferred to the sprawling convention center — meaning taxpayers’ cost for the makeshift hospital turned out to be more than $1.7 million per patient, on average.
https://chicago.suntimes.com/2020/8/14/21367889/mccormick-place-coronavirus-hospital-cost-walsh-construction-mcpier-lori-lightfoot-army-corps