A store owner in New York is speaking out following the destructive riots and looting that severely hurt his business on Monday night.
“The quarantine hit me hard. I closed completely for almost two months. We were just getting back up on our feet with online sales,” 25-year-old Oscar Izaguirre, who owns Oscar’s Gold & Diamonds, told the New York Post Saturday.
His parents opened the shop in the Bronx after moving from Peru and worked hard to put him and his siblings through college.
When friends called Monday to warn him that rioters were headed his way, Izaguirre said he felt “terrified.”
“There’s millions of dollars of merchandise. Along with 15 or so friends, I moved everything to a safe location,” he recalled, adding that he later watched men with sledgehammers break into the store via a security camera.
Izaguirre continued:
By the time I got there, there were gunshots and fires on the street. Some people had weapons: crowbars, bricks. I was afraid they’d burn up my store, but I stood 20 feet away and said nothing. I was afraid for my life. For several hours, I watched looters go into my store and break the cameras, bash the glass cases, destroy the wiring, even knock out the ceiling tiles. Every store around me got trashed, and I did not hear one rant for justice or for George Floyd. Not in The Bronx, not that night. That night, they targeted minorities. They were opportunists who just wanted to steal.
However, Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance said Friday that rioters arrested for “low-level” crimes, such as unlawful assembly or disorderly conduct, would not face any charges, according to Breitbart News.
“The announcement means the overwhelming majority of hundreds of rioters in New York City will likely not face any criminal prosecution,” the report noted.
Despite the violent protests and demonstrations that swept across the city recently, Mayor Bill de Blasio tweeted Sunday that officials had committed to moving resources from the New York Police Department (NYPD) to “youth and social services as part of our City’s budget”:
This morning we committed to move resources from the NYPD to youth and social services as part of our City’s budget.
Saturday, Izaguirre noted that by breaking into and stealing from his store, the looters sent a message that said he did not “deserve” what he and his family worked so hard to achieve.
“But I’m a minority, too. My family and I have worked our whole lives for this,” he concluded.
Billionaire Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, scolded a customer in an email for saying “all lives matter” and says he fully supports the Black Lives Matter movement.
In the midst of rioting over the death of George Floyd, Bezos posted to his Instagram account his response to a customer who expressed her opposition to the current banner on Amazon which reads “Black lives matter.”
“ALL LIVES MATTER!” the customer wrote in an email. “… if it wasn’t for all these lives providing their service to [you] and your company, where would Amazon be today?”
(Screenshot via Amazon.com)
In response, Bezos reaffirmed his support for the Black Lives Matter movement:
No, Macy, I have to disagree with you. ‘Black lives matter’ doesn’t mean other lives don’t matter. Black lives matter speaks to racism that Black people face in our law enforcement and justice system. I have a 20-year-old son, and I simply don’t worry that he might be choked to death while being detained one day. It’s not something I worry about. Black parents can’t say the same.
None of this is intended to dismiss or minimize the very real worries you or anyone else might have in their own life, but I want you to know I support this that we see happening all around us, and my stance won’t change.
The Black Lives Matter movement’s latest initiative includes lobbying cities and counties to defund their police and sheriff departments.
Bezos has continuously been accused of poor working conditions and exhaustive hours — especially in recent months during the Chinese coronavirus crisis. A lawsuit filed last week alleges that Amazon’s working New York City warehouse facility put workers in danger.
In April, Amazon fired whistleblower employee Chris Smalls, a black American, for speaking out about the danger he and his colleagues had allegedly been put in to continue fast-paced distribution in the middle of the coronavirus crisis.
Bezos has grown his net wealth by nearly $35 billion since last year.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
One of the many strangenesses of the current riotous unrest is this: The people in the streets—protesting, looting, gawking, whatevering—are operating in a media-drenched environment.That is, they are in the news, they are making news, and, as “newsmakers,” we know exactly who they are.
Knowing their identity: That’s the key to settling up accounts.Maybe not right away, but eventually.
Yes, the hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people in the streets are becoming media figures of a kind.Together, they are famous, or notorious, and yet individually, they are known to us. That is, the computer cloud sees all, and knows all.The cloud can identify each individual involved—including all the criminals and their criminal acts.So the challenge is to access that cloud, on behalf of law and order.
Yet for the times being, this craziness is just instant fodder for social media.Here, for example, is a tweet video of woke hipsters saluting protesters—and getting their windows smashed with rocks.Is this news?Sure it is.For one thing, it reminds us that naive wokesters don’t understand whom they are dealing with when they cheer on thugs, and yet the video is news, as well, of a crime that was just committed.
Or how ’bout this: looters using a fork-lift to smash their way into a Best Buy.Is that news?In a micro-sense, you bet it is: It’s certainly news that Best Buy can use, and every other property owner for defense.Or this: spray-painting rioters in Boston defacing the “Glory” monument to black soldiers in the U.S. Civil War.That’s news that the current thuggery is the opposite of legitimate civil rights activism.
Indeed, crimes are being committed that are ridiculous, and, at the same time, savage, such as this video of a looter being looted.Or this crazy naked man, attacking and being attacked.
Yet the newest news also includes plenty of viciousness and tragedy, including violent assaults on persons, and even murders. And it’s typically the case that the first report comes from someone’s mobile phone—quite possibly, from the phone of one of the perpetrators.
In fact, each perp—as well as each person—is leaving not only a data trail, but also a metadata trail, concerning their geographic location, plus whatever other data might be being recorded by an app on their mobile.
A protester breaks a window with a chair during a protest in downtown Los Angeles, Friday, May 29, 2020. (AP Photo/Christian Monterrosa)
Flames from a nearby fire illuminate protesters standing on a barricade in front of the Third Police Precinct on May 28, 2020, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, during a protest over the death of George Floyd. The precinct, which police had abandoned, burned after a group of protesters pushed through barriers around the building, breaking windows and chanting slogans. A much larger crowd demonstrated as the building went up in flames. (KEREM YUCEL/AFP via Getty Images)
Protesters capture suspect destroying sidewalk in a video posted online amid protests in D.C. on May 31, 2020. Later in the clip, the suspect is handed over to police. (s_Allahverdi/Twitter, screenshot)
The density of this digital mesh is, in fact, astonishing.In America today, some 300 million mobile phones are in use, and of these, more than 275 million are smart phones—and an iPhone produces vastly more data than an antique Motorola.
We can further add that virtually every young person—the demographic most likely to be out on the streets—has a mobile phone; according to a 2018 report from the Pew Center, 99 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 49 have mobile phones, and of these, 19 in 20 have smart phones.
Each of these devices produces a daily torrent of data, measured in megabytes or even gigabytes, beaming first to cell phone towers (there were 307,000 such towers in the U.S. in 2016), then to switching centers and servers, and then to other devices.
Of course, there’s a permanent record of all this data.That’s the whole point of the economics that undergird digital technology: The value to a wireless company, such as, say, Verizon, isn’t just the fees paid for the monthly data plan; it’s also the value of the data as it’s sold or rented to marketers and other researchers.Thus every byte ends up being algorithm-ed by a googol of data-crunchers and advertisers.
In addition, every app on a phone builds a file on its user.It’s all perfectly legal—unless, of course, someone is stealthily breaking the terms of those End Use License Agreements, the document that nobody reads before clicking “agree,” and that nobody would understand if they did read it.
Also, let’s not forget our data-hungry government: Even before the 2013 revelations of former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden—the nogoodnik who leaked everything he could before defecting to Russia, where he lives as a fugitive to this day—we all sort of knew that the NSA was monitoring our communications.
So now, if we step back to gain perspective about these billion haystacks of data, we can see: It’s easy for a computer to thresh out the needles in each of those haystacks.After all, that’s what artificial intelligence (AI) is all about—finding the needles in each haystack.
Today, corporate America looks for needles of marketing opportunities, and the federal government looks for needles of foreign terrorists and other kinds of criminals.And now, since we have so many more criminals in the wake of the rioting, there are even more needles to seek, and to find.
Thus, in reaction to all this street violence, an easy solution presents itself: Let’s identify all the needles that have been out in the streets, committing crimes.After all, they aren’t even hiding in haystacks; they’re all out in the open—except, of course, when they’re inside looting stores.And when they emerge from their plundering, when they’re burdened with loot, they’re even easier to identify.
In other words, all the needles of crime are right there in front of us. Thus we have the setup for a giant Digital Dragnet—an infinitely bigger dragnet for crooks, in fact, than the classic TV show ever imagined.Let’s use big data to identify each and every protester, and then, operating within that data set, let’s figure out who’s a criminal.
Fortunately, criminals tend to be not very smart.And so they haven’t thought about the fact that they are carrying, on their person, the cellular tool for their detection.Indeed, some of them are so happy in what they are doing—criminals tend to have short time-horizons, as well as a weak understanding of cause and effect—so that they happily mug for the camera, not thinking about the permanent record being created.
Yet even more sophisticated people—like, say, college students who are vandalizing a downtown for the fun of it—might not have absorbed just what a sophisticated science that mobile phone tracking has become, enabling data miners to find human “ore” with astonishing granularity, mapping human movements down to the individual level. That’s why, for example, Apple’s Find My iPhone works so well.
People are seen looting the Apple store at the Grove shopping center in the Fairfax District of Los Angeles on May 30, 2020. (VALERIE MACON/AFP via Getty Images)
In fact, these phone-tracking devices work even when the phone is turned off. And that’s why Apple also knows the location of each one of its looted phones; so now, after they have been “liberated”—that is, heisted from an Apple store—the new proud “liberator” turns it on and sees a message that reads, “This device has been disabled and is being tracked. Local authorities will be alerted.”
For the moment, of course, Apple is striking the pose of a woke company, and so any notion of working with law enforcement is not currently a part of its PR vocabulary.
Yet still, corporate wokeness never seems to get in the way of the corporate bottom line. So yes, Apple believes that Black Lives Matter, but it also believes that iPhones Matter—and it wants them back, or, failing that, wants to make sure that anybody who wants a working iPhone will have to actually pay for it.
Deepening the Dragnet
So we can see, cell phone data is robust.And it’s about to get a lot more robust. We might recall, after all, that up until a few days ago, authorities were intensely interested in knowing people’s precise whereabouts, so as to test them for Covid-19.Indeed, the recent CARES legislation—the $2 trillion package of relief signed into law by President Trump in March—included $500 million for the Centers for Disease Control to develop a new “surveillance and data collection system.”
Now we can realize that there’s another virus—namely, wanton criminality—that we need also need to track. So yes, indeed, let’s track the dangers to our society; we might well discover the violence is the worse virus.
We might also note that mobile phone data is not the only kind of data that we possess; we also have security cameras.In 2019, the Project on Government Oversight of government estimated that 30 million security cameras were in use; each is capturing footage 24/7.
Moreover, security cameras have now been joined by home-security video products, such as Amazon Ring, which, nationwide, is integrated in with more than 1,000 police departments.As was noted here at Breitbart News, Amazon is, in fact, in the process of turning its home-security system into a kind of show—a reality show of whatever happens outside one’s front door, which can, all too often, be a violent reality show.
In addition, according to the Federal Aviation Administration, there are more than 1.5 million drones registered with authorities—and who knows how many more drones are in existence.So we can see: lots of video, and other data, from all those unmanned aerial vehicles.
So how many helicopters, and other aircraft, do authorities have? Numbers from back in 2007 suggest that more than 200 police departments across the U.S. have aviation units, operating more than 900 aircraft—almost all of these helicopters. Helicopters are great for surveillance.
And so what to do with this surveillance capacity? We can also note that facial recognition is one of the hottest fields in tech right now.A good AI program can scan a crowd and identify each person.In fact, a really good AI program can identify even those wearing masks—just from their eyes and cheekbones.And there’s also gait recognition; that is, AI can ID someone by the way he or she walks; no mask can hide that.
Cracking Cases
As we have seen, all this data is sitting there, waiting to be used.At the moment, it’s in many different corporate and government silos, and plenty of laws and taboos prevent it from being aggregated into one holistic, and actionable, database.(This was the problem we faced prior to 9/11, when the CIA and FBI were prevented from sharing information about terrorists; necessarily, the law was soon thereafter changed.)
Yes, the data are still all there, waiting for us.So now what’s needed is the political will to put law enforcement to the task of tracking domestic marauders; a few legal changes, and a few hundred subpoenas, would get the job done. To be sure, it’s far from obvious that the political will exists do any of this data-consolidating, and thus case-closing; the Democrats, many of them deeply invested in riot ideology, will oppose it, and so will many libertarians.If the opposition succeeds, then good times for thugs.
Still, in the meantime, good police work is weaving the available data threads into a knowledge-tapestry of criminality.For instance, on May 31, New York City’s deputy police commissioner for counter-terrorism, John Miller, outlined his analysis of the violence:
Before the protests began organizers of certain anarchist groups set out to raise bail money and people who would be responsible to be raising bail money, they set out to recruit medics and medical teams with gear to deploy in anticipation of violent interactions with police.
In other words, this was, in no small part, a conspiracy. Which explains why, for instance, stacks of bricks for protesters to throw through windows—or at cops’ heads—were placed all around New York City. Heck, stacks of projectiles were even placed in Kansas City, Missouri. (Did we mention that satellite surveillance, too, could play a role in tracking such obvious major movements?) On June 6, Antifa observer Andy Ngo tweeted that two men driving a car with Ohio license plates were arrested in New York City; the vehicle was full of weapons, burner phones, gas masks, everything a terrorist might want.
Two men in a car w/Ohio plates were arrested at the NYC riot. They were found with a cache of weapons & items in their car like knives, a machete, gasoline, radios, burner phones, bricks, gas masks & more. Their names have not been released yet. #antifahttps://t.co/7HOoUNSn5fpic.twitter.com/by639zlZwx
As an aside, some might ask: While the NYPD was doing all this good work, where was the FBI?Oh yes, we remember: Much of the FBI’s Deep Statist leadership was too busy trying to frame Michael Flynn. Maybe the FBI should try a little harder to unravel conspiracies, not create its own.
Belatedly, we’re starting to realize how deeply the terrorist network has penetrated our society. We know, now, that they’ve been using Twitter as a tool, and Reddit, too, among many familiar apps and media. They have their own network of partially George Soros-funded lawyers. And yes, there was the curious case of the molotov-cocktail woman in New York City whose $250,000 bail was guaranteed by a lawyer who had previously worked in the federal government, handling highly classified documents, for Barack Obama. Perhaps a thread or two hereto unravel. And speaking of Soros, on June 4, James O’Keefe of Project Veritas revealed undercover video of a vicious Antifa group in Portland, Oregon, which seems to have many connections to Sweden, as well as to, yes, that same Hungarian-born billionaire.
So perhaps now is a good time to revisit legislation first proposed last year by Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, designating Antifa as a terrorist group, thus greatly strengthening law enforcement’s hand; Cassidy was soon joined by Sen. Ted Cruz and other senators. Such legislation, if enacted, would almost certainly guarantee that the president’s recent executive designation of Antifa would survive the inevitable court challenge.
Yet for the moment, the terrorists are more than holding their own—and if the Democrats win this November, they have little to fear, at least in the short run.
However, it’s possible that a tougher regime will come; after all even the Democrats, if they are in charge after November, will have to wise up soon enough, lest the whole country be sacked. And that’s not such a good platform on which to seek reelection. Both parties know that the vast majority of Americans will despise what’s happening—that’s why, for example, by a nearly 2:1 majority, Americans support sending the military into the cities to provide security. In other words, in addition to buying lots of guns, voters will stand ready to endorse law and order—which, these days, inevitably includes tech-detection.
So a strong leader would seek a mandate to change the laws necessary to make it possible to correlate all this data, thereby building a database of every thug and criminal.Then, once we have all this information in hand, we can figure out what to do with it.Should we prosecute all whom we identify?Or merely send most of them all a bill for the damage they have caused?
Surely, a just country that prizes honesty and civic responsibility would declare, first, that those who have committed felonies shouldn’t be allowed to vote, and second, that those who owe lots of money should have that debt weighed against future benefits, starting with student financial aid, and including the future garnishing of wages and dividends.
So we can see: The Digital Dragnet could not only punish the heinously guilty, it could also pay for itself with money seized from fun-loving Antifa youths—or from their parents, or from their trust funds.
Local and state officials will be seeking federal assistance to pay the cost of the damage done to Minneapolis during rioting that took place after the death of George Floyd. Democratic Mayor Jacob Frey said that so far, damage is estimated at $55 million, according to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. That estimate, compiled as of Tuesday,…
Uber Eats is offering free delivery to only black-owned restaurants until the end of 2020, the company’s CEO announced in an email on Thursday.
“Uber Eats will promote black-owned restaurants on its app, and that the service will not charge delivery fees to those restaurants ‘for the remainder of the year,’” Fox News reported.
The company will also provide “discounted rides to black-owned small businesses ‘who have been hit hard by COVID-19,’ though it did not add how much of a discount would be given,” the report added.
“As a company, we believe that everyone has the right to move freely, no matter where they live or the color of their skin,” CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said via email to customers, according to the Detroit Bureau. “We’re proud of how Uber has helped improve transportation equity over the last decade. But the reality remains that Black Americans often don’t feel safe to move freely in many places around our country. And they still face enormous barriers that others do not.”
“I wish that the lives of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and countless others weren’t so violently cut short,” Khosrowshahi said. “I wish that institutional racism, and the police violence it gives rise to, didn’t cause their deaths.”
The CEO “pledged that Uber will continue to crack down on discrimination, harassment and racism on its platform, and will hold its users accountable ‘to these standards of basic respect and human decency,’” Fox noted.
“I respectfully ask anyone not willing to abide by these rules to delete Uber,” Khosrowshahi stated.
The move has been criticized by some for its discriminatory racial bias.
“This is illegal,” Daily Wire podcast host Michael Knowles bluntly posted.
“So [Uber Eats] is actually segregating restaurants by the race of the owner and offering different pricing on that basis?” questioned the popular conservative writer commonly known as “AG conservative.” “Does no one seriously recognize the issue with that? I thought it was a joke when someone sent it to me, but then saw it on the app.”
“Putting aside the obvious legal questions, the road to equality can’t be paved by discrimination,” he added.
Putting aside the obvious legal questions, the road to equality can’t be paved by discrimination.
One commenter replied, “Put aside the whole white people thing but what about other minorities like Asians, Hispanics, Jews, Indians, etc? They don’t think these people are going to feel discriminated against and isn’t that going to naturally further racial divides?”
AG Conservative responded: “Yes. A smarter, and more justifiable, approach would be to target neighborhoods affected by the riots or looting. But instead, they are creating a tiered fee structure based solely on the race of the restaurant owner.”
Yes. A smarter, and more justifiable, approach would be to target neighborhoods affected by the riots or looting. But instead. they are creating a tiered fee structure based solely on the race of the restaurant owner. https://t.co/TTaE1qkpyv
Food magazine Bon Apetit is focusing on black-owned businesses, too, but in a different way than Uber Eats.
“As many of us have been inspired to stand in solidarity with the Black community, so has food media,” a story from Bon Apetit’s website says. “Across the country, restaurant critics, writers, and local food lovers have been pulling together extensive lists highlighting Black-owned businesses in their respective cities.”
“We wanted to share what they’re creating, from Google spreadsheets with updates on take-out/delivery options and GoFundMe links to websites that have long been celebrating Black-owned businesses and owners,” the site continues. “We will continue to update this page as more resources become available, and encourage you to use these resources now, and always. Let us know if you come across anything that would be helpful to add to this growing list by emailing us at staff.bonappetit@gmail.com with the subject line ‘Black-owned businesses.’”
The Daily Wire, headed by bestselling author and popular podcast host Ben Shapiro, is a leading provider of conservative news, cutting through the mainstream media’s rhetoric to provide readers the most important, relevant, and engaging stories of the day. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a member.
US Attorney General William Barr on Sunday spoke to CBS’s “Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan about the ongoing George Floyd riots.
As per usual, CBS’s Margaret Brennan did her best to spread fake news and propaganda by claiming the protests have been “largely peaceful,” however, Bill Barr destroyed all of her talking points.
“A senior administration official told our CBS’s David Martin that in a meeting at the White House on Monday morning, the President demanded that 10,000 active-duty troops be ordered into American streets — Is that accurate?” Brennan asked Barr.
Barr dismantled her fake news propaganda and explained that the DC police had told him in a meeting that the riots on Sunday night in Washington were the most violent in 30 years.
“And there had been a riot right along Lafayette Park. I was called over and asked if I would coordinate federal civil agencies and that the Defense Department would provide whatever support I needed or we needed to protect federal property federal– at the White House, federal personnel. The decision was made to have at the ready and on hand in the vicinity some regular troops,” Barr said.
Later on in the interview, Margaret Brennan referred to the violent rioters as “peaceful protesters” and Barr called out the lying media.
“Did you think it was appropriate for them to use smoke bombs, tear gas, pepper balls, projectiles at what appeared to be peaceful protesters?” Brennan asked Barr.
Barr replied, “They were not peaceful protesters. And that’s one of the big lies that the media is– seems to be perpetuating at this point.”
What can be done about the current wave of urban riots? The obvious answer is, sad to say, not much. Public officials with only a handful of exceptions are paralyzed to respond with the necessary force lest they be accused of brutality and provoke yet more rioting and violence. There is some good news, however. Evolution matters—homo sapiens have adapted and survived worse. Protecting society from chaos is far from hopeless though not immediately. Solutions are possible and need not cost a fortune or require draconian social engineering to domesticate a violent under-class.
Let’s start with architectural adjustments, bricks and mortar fixes to use a currently popular term, are guaranteed to perform as advertised for the simple reasons that rich people for millennia have successfully protected their property from violent rabble. We already possess formulae. Medieval castles with their moats and drawbridges, stone walls and narrow windows may not have been totally secure, but hard to imagine today’s screeching social justice warriors looting it. Urban planners of yesteryear knew how to safeguard a city—think Washington, DC and Paris–where a few well-placed troops could block unruly mobs marching on the capital. County seats in American Midwest towns typically have solid stone fortress-like, easily defended courthouses, built on hills, obviously designed to prevent debtors from seizing and then burning their mortgages (think Shays’ Rebellion).
This anti-looter architectural style has long been visible in “diverse” neighborhoods populated by a criminally inclined clientele. The distinctive and highly functional style features bars on the windows, cashiers secure inside bullet-proof plexiglass cages, and security cameras everywhere. Signs warn patrons that they are on camera and when these businesses close for the day, they are protected by steel shutters. Potential troublemakers know full well that the counter clerk is often armed, most cash is kept in an inaccessible safe and a large German Shepard frequently keeps the clerk company. Occasional news accounts tell of clerks shooting a would-be robber, so stick-ups are relatively rare.
If the threat of mass looting becomes commonplace, this “ghetto” defense style is easily extended to more mainstream establishments albeit with better optics. In a word, commerce would be “hardened.” Target, pharmacies and even liquor stores can build fortress-like stores with slits smash- proof glass windows and a single impenetrable steel blast front door that can be closed by remote control from company headquarters, if necessary. As with Medieval castles, employees can flee via hidden passageways and safely re-emerge blocks away. Totally secure “safe rooms” might be available if the staff and lingering customers are caught by surprise.
The modern mall—including downtown versions–will be totally re-designed to be entirely surrounded by windowless brick or concrete walls with a small number of quickly sealable entrances. Mall stores that have past histories of attracting looters—those selling sneakers, electronics, cell phones, for example, would be segregated to one section and if a riot occurred, a steel gate would be deployed to isolate them (high-priced Michael Jordans can be displayed only one shoe at a time with the second shoe kept at a secret off-premises location). Parking lots in the suburbs would have fewer points of entry and could quickly be closed to prevent the feeding fests that occur once it became known that a looting party was in progress. Access from public transportation, often the source of troublemakers, could be re-configured so as to better control entry.
The recent shift to e-commerce also provides major opportunities for risk management. Stores like Best Buy no longer need to have piles of self-service merchandise so alluring to the grab-and-run crowd. Stores need only display a single (securely chained) model of a TV or iPhone, and if ordered, it would be delivered same day at no charge via Amazon or FedEx. Want it now? Visit the customer fulfillment center, a bunker-like building behind a ten-foot wall a half mile distant. Going cashless could also be extended and thus reduce looter incentives to damage registers and safes while providing quicker access to customer payments.
Upscale, super-pricey stores that wish to keep their present ambiance can adopt a scorched earth approach, a military strategy that undermines the enemy by preemptively destroying anything of value—food, vehicles, industrial resources—before the enemy arrives. So, if the looters are milling outside a Gucci boutique, and the situation looks threatening, the staff will immediately spray paint or otherwise mutilate everything. This is not as draconian as it may seems since ultra-luxury stores stock minimal inventory (this conveys “exclusivity”) and extraordinary high store mark-ups limit actual monetary loss. Less obvious, these firms—Dior, Chanel, Fendi, Burberry etc.—anyway dread their brand being “ghettoized” so destroying them prior to theft is a wise business choice. Would-be looters are not that stupid—who would steal a shredded Prada or a Louis Vuitton purse?
This conversion is not as costly as it may initially appear. Savvy builders favoring this anti-looting style would enjoy an advantage in today’s struggling commercial real estate market. Brick and mortar stores relying on e-commerce for partial fulfillment would be smaller with and thus would pay less rent. A powerful incentive would be reduced insurance premiums and, as an added bonus, the insurance firms would research looter behavior to advise real estate developers. City ordinances can also legally require anti-riot measures (“public safety”) just as they currently demand fire doors and automatic sprinklers. Laws might be passed to limit the number of unaccompanied minors allowed into stores at any one time to prevent a critical mass of unruly teenagers.
Meanwhile, private security would be transformed. Gone would be the ubiquitous inoffensive, elderly “mall cop” terrified of racial profiling accusations and thus unable to deter young black troublemakers. Now fight fire-with-fire: hire security whose appearances terrify young would-be hoodlums. A few well-tattooed Mexican gangbangers might make white middle class shoppers slightly uneasy, but the message would unambiguous to blacks—don’t mess! Beefy Russians with gold teeth and thick accents would also do the trick.
Looters sense cowardice. During the 1960s a pet store in New York City’s “Spanish Harlem” (actually an Italian enclave) went absolutely untouched despite days of nearby looting and burning. Not a single parakeet was inconvenienced. Everybody knew that the store was mob-owned, and the Mafia was not easily intimidated by local punks.
The catalogue of adaptive responses to the breakdown of civil society is far more extensive than depicted here. Elon Musk and others can surely improve upon Tasers, pepper spray and tear gas. What about jamming or frying cellphones? During the 1960s I recall research on generating extra low levels sound waves that would induce an involuntary bowel movement. Concentrated cat urine might work better than tear gas. These would slow down any mob. The Covid-19 pandemic illustrates how people can quickly re-locate to secure persona safety, and telecommuting may take root not to escape disease but also to avoid young men outraged over America’s historic structural racism and economic inequality.
Evolution saves lives. Not even feckless politicians and race-mongers can stop adaptions to avoid mayhem. Civilized people for millennia have successfully deterred the barbarians, so we are just reawakening dormant responses. Keep in mind that the modern style professional police force is only a little more than 200 years old, so it is hardly a core requirement of civilization.
CARACAS – It has been over a week since the U.S.-based cable company DirecTV ceased operations in Venezuela, unplugging ten million viewers — yours truly included.
The situation has resonated so much lately that even Secretary of State Mike Pompeo weighed in, referencing Futból Total, a popular soccer show that DirecTV Sports airs in Latin America.
Why can’t Venezuelans watch Fútbol Total? Because Nicolás Maduro drove DirecTV out. Protecting his cronies and their money is more important than allowing ten million citizens access to uncensored information.
A legal crossroads that made the company choose between compliance with U.S. sanctions and asphyxiating Venezuelan telecommunications laws forced AT&T to shut down DirecTV’s cable service in Venezuela. It’s understandable: if you’re a U.S.-based company and you find yourself in this situation, who would you rather comply with: your own government or Maduro’s illegitimate narco-regime?
The answer is a no-brainer, even if it’s an unsavory one for their customers in the country. Yet it took years for AT&T to make the decision.
For years, Maduro’s regime forced DirecTV and other cable companies to censor and remove channels from their grid whenever they became a real challenge to the socialist regime’s narrative, or because they became a nuisance. The regime also forced cable companies to operate at a dramatic loss, obligating them to charge absurdly low fees to their customers.
My last bill, inaccessible through the now-defunct DirecTV Venezuela website (but can be referenced through my bank statement) dated April 24th, 2020, went for 163,900.00 bolivars – less than $1. That’s not even enough for a loaf of bread.
Christian K. Caruzo/Breitbart News
All the laws and regulations imposed on DirecTV and other providers over the years had one hidden purpose: to build the legal means that allows them to force cable TV providers to broadcast their propaganda alongside their regular programming, covering areas of the country that they could not get to on their own. Should they fail to comply, they faced being heavily fined, sanctioned, or worse, expropriated.
CONATEL, the regime’s Telecommunications committee – and censor extraordinaire – imposes mandatory channel quotas that force cable operators to carry what is known by law as “public service community TV,” a Trojan-horse legal recourse that lets them shove TV channels in there such as TV FANB (Bolivarian Armed Forces TV) and PDVSA TV (state oil company TV), plagued by all sorts of socialist ideology nonsense and the most rancid of anti-American messages and ads.
Take, for example, this reworking of the legendary Queen song “We Will Rock You,” which replaces the chorus with “no more Trump, no more Trump.” Hard to believe the Venezuelan state paid Queen any royalties for it:
Or this cartoon of late dictator Hugo Chávez, featuring a revised version of the Lord’s Prayer that replaces “our Father” with “our Chávez”:
With AT&T out and its former customers disconnected from the service, DirecTV has become the latest bizarre battlefield for both the regime and the opposition, as each side attempts to seize the opportunity to rally whoever still believes in either camp.
Maduro, an avid DirecTV subscriber, has openly mocked its departure. Regime figureheads have had the audacity (and hypocrisy) of attempting to frame this situation as if they were victims, not wasting the opportunity to take jabs at legitimate but non-functional President Juan Guaidó. It is ironic to see a man like Pedro Carreño, a former soldier turned socialist politician, blame U.S. sanctions and berating the Escualidos (derogatory term for people who do not support the regime roughly meaning “scrawny ones”) for the departure of DirecTV when twenty years ago he peddled a conspiracy theory that DirecTV devices recorded their users.
In a blatant display of bread and circus politics, the Maduro Supreme Court has ordered the seizure of all of DirecTV’s assets and has forced the company to reactivate the signal as it was (including the sanctioned TV channels that led to their departure in the first place), as if they could simply storm the facilities with a bunch of soldiers and be able to reconnect to DirecTV’s satellite.
For the regime, this act is not about preserving customer rights. It’s about the DirecTV satellite cable infrastructure that they can no longer leech from. The once flaunted Venesat-1 satellite of Chinese quality and craftsmanship is now a huge pile of junk drifting in space.
The loss of their stranglehold on DirecTV’s broadcast infrastructure put a huge dent in the regime’s propaganda diffusion. Their stubbornness and own laws ended up backfiring on them, leaving them as a fine example of the old saying “se quedaron sin el chivo y sin el mecate” – they tried to tie up the wild goat, but they lost the goat and the rope.
Meanwhile, Guaidó has released several statements, clinging to perceived momentum in a vain attempt to regain some of the relevance lost throughout the past months. That’s pretty much all he’s done before and after this, so its business as usual with him.
AT&T, through its DirecTV Venezuela subsidiary, has joined the ever-growing list of American companies that, after years of constant threats and regulations by the socialist regime of Venezuela, have reached the ultimate conclusion of cutting their losses and closing their doors, such as Clorox and Kellogg. The Maduro regime has seized both of their assets on the ground. In Kellogg’s case, Maduro has actually spearheaded their use to manufacture counterfeit socialist cereal.
Chocolate frosted flakes with coronavirus branding in Caracas, Venezuela. Nicolás Maduro seized the city’s Kellogg plant in 2018 after the company left the country and manufactures “Kellogg’s” cereals with no regard to intellectual property law. (Christian K. Caruzo/Breitbart News)
Some companies remain in Venezuela, forced through the regime’s constant bullying to operate at a loss or dramatically cut down costs in order to stay afloat. Mcdonald’s Venezuela, for example, had to ditch the sale of fries and substitute yuca, a cheaper Caribbean tuber, for potatoes. When it finally restored access to potatoes, McDonald’s launched an all-out ad blitz for their new luxury product —an occurrence only possible (and a consequence) of the Bolivarian Revolution.
— McDonald’s Venezuela (@McDonalds_VE) March 7, 2020
Certainly, there are still cable tv alternatives for Venezuelan customers to replace DirecTV with — including going to the black market and replacing the service with its Colombian iteration using smuggled equipment – but in these complicated socialist collapse times of water, gasoline, hyperinflation, and food shortages that we live in, one’s priorities are aimed towards more pressing matters.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
More than 1.4 million cases of Wuhan Coronavirus and 106,000 deaths in the United States alone have accompanied stay-home lockdowns, businesses bankruptcies, over 40 million unemployed workers, plummeting tax revenues and unprecedented debt. Ongoing rioting, vandalism, arson and looting are compounding problems for many cities and minority communities.
