Baltimore manged to reach the end of the year without hitting 365 homicides. Only 347!
oops, I forgot to hit "post" with Heebie's take.
Unless there were two more in the past week, Oakland seems to have closed out the year with another record low homicides, 72.
Go Baltimore!
Morales went down, after moving politics way the fuck leftward but before destroying the country. I think. I know fuck all about Bolivia.
Baltimore murder rate: 57 per 100K
Oakland murder rate: 18 per 100K
2018 U.S. murder rate as a whole: 5 per 100K
Chicago 490, so 16/100k, bad but a lot better than a scary 2016 which was 24/100k.
The department in recent years has created support centers where supervisors use information from many sources and technologies -- including security cameras and gunshot detection systems -- to learn where crimes are happening and where they are likely to occur."I think that all of those things working together -- being on the ground, supporting vulnerable victims, supporting vulnerable communities -- led to the declines that we saw this year, and particularly over the course of the summer," Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot ...In other words, opinions about state surveillance differ widely.
Darn. According to ABC News a man was killed in Oakland on December 31 and that brought the year's total to 75.
(They say he was at a Starbucks in a wealthy area working on his laptop, someone snatched it and ran, he chased after them, apparently grabbed onto their getaway car, and was "flung head-first into a parked car". I'm unsure that that should be sorted as homicide - are the journalists applying the felony murder rule we just got rid of?)
I guess it depends if they knew he was latched on or not.
Other good Chicago news is Pritzger's pot pardons: https://www.chicagotribune.com/marijuana/illinois/ct-jb-pritzker-marijuana-pardons-20191231-ka24pnnrfzfn5hmyzodwsshs74-story.html
We got (very highly regulated) legal weed in the new year, and the governor pardoned anyone with a conviction for 30 grams or less.
Is there any for sale in Midway? Asking for a friend who just landed.
The Nuts on Clark is gone, so I can't even have munchies.
That wasn't enough time to look for pot.
Another silver lining for 2019 was no war with Iran...
Trump has blinked every other time.
This time the ball isn't in his court, though.
17, yes. Iran will definitely retaliate and escalate strikes against Saudi oil installations and shipping in the Gulf like we saw a few months ago, and possibly target theirdesalination plants and water pipelines feeding Riyadh which would be disastrous. This will put pressure on the US from KSA and UAE to deescalate (it seems that MBS and MBZ didn't actually want that war with Iran they'd wanted when that happened earlier in the year). But this demands a symbolic response against American targets and I'm sure we'll see that. I don't think they'll hit Udeid or the US Navy base in Bahrain though at this time anything is possible. But Americans currently in Iraq should get the hell out now. Coalition partners too. What a clusterfuck.
18: Which they were doing anyway, on the plausible calculation that Trump would fold and relieve sanctions: see Abqaiq and the rocket attacks on US bases last week. The Iranians don't want a war either.
TBC, not denying it's a clusterfuck. Amazingly bad timing, even if nothing else.
Yeah, but the attacks on Saudi were over three months ago and nothing since. Iraq is a different matter. Of course none of that matters now, the gloves are off.
Might as well put this comment in the right thread.
So last night I went to a bar here with a friend and colleague who was in the Canadian Army and in Iraq in the 1980s with UNIMOG. There was a guy who we struck up a conversation with, turns out he's Canadian Army and active duty, in intelligence. He'd been in Iraq in 2016 and 2017 as part of the anti-ISIL operations then. He said he was going to Thailand on vacation with a fellow Canadian Army buddy of his (that dude stayed at the bar, we were all hanging out on the balcony for occasional smoke breaks). We ended up talking for quite a while but at one point as we were about to leave they'd just left suddenly, without saying goodbye which struck me as odd at the time. I wonder if he'd gotten word.
My kid just asked me "What's with all these World War III memes all of a sudden?"
They also remade Top Gun. Or did a sequel. I can't tell which without looking it up.