Notes from the edge of civilization: December 8, 2024
Vigilante justice is not a good sign; throwing out the Ba'ath water; WTF Canada!?; the WHO just couldn't do it.
It is a symptom of a deeply hurt and broken nation that shooting a man down in cold blood on a Manhattan street causes people to react with cynicism and sarcastic jokes.
It’s not that Americans don’t care when someone is murdered, but perhaps when the victim represents such an avaricious and mercenary industry as health insurance, sympathy becomes harder to muster. When you’ve been denied care, treated as a number, and watched while loved ones struggle with debt because of mounting medical bills, it is not so difficult to understand the anger and frustration.
What is harder to understand is how the alleged shooter managed to ride a bike up Sixth Avenue into Central Park, drop his backpack containing a jacket and fake Monopoly money, take a cab out of the park area, board an interstate bus, and simply vanish.
Whether the police are getting any closer to finding the suspect is an open question. The New York Post reports that Mayor Eric Adams was at a Police Athletic League holiday party in Harlem on Saturday. He spoke to reporters, telling them: “the net is tightening.”
What is certain, however, is that vigilante justice has to potential to unleash a rather dark age in America should it take hold. After all, justifying cold-blooded murder against someone perceived to be your rival or to have done you an injustice is easy when, as a nation, we’re bereft of a moral anchor. Our friend Peter Grandich has been saying this for a while: not since the Civil War have we been so divided as a nation — brother against brother, family against family — so, social media snark aside, it would behoove us to collectively introspect to ensure we don’t become what we’re quick to loathe in so many other countries.
Meanwhile, as you’ve probably already read by now, Syria’s leader Bashar al-Assad is also on the run. He fled the capital, Damascus, yesterday and his whereabouts are currently unknown. The group now in control, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, is a jihadist rebellion branded a terrorist group by the United States and many Western countries. The group promotes a conservative, hard-line Sunni Islamist ideology.
CNN shared an 8-minute interview with the group’s leader, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, earlier this week in which he described the restraint and discipline of his rebel soldiers.
The group’s leader, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, told The New York Times his primary goal was to “liberate Syria from this oppressive regime.” He has tried to gain legitimacy by providing services to residents in his stronghold of Idlib.
Publicly, American officials have been cautious about Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. But inside the U.S. government, some officials believe the group’s turn toward pragmatism is genuine, and that its leaders know they cannot realize aspirations to join or lead the Syrian government if the group is seen as a jihadist organization.
The fall of al-Assad’s regime marks the final Ba’athist government in the region; the penultimate was Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq.
While the two are not exact corollaries, what followed in the vacuum left in Iraq was years of ugly sectarian violence on top of the miserable exploits of the US military. Syria’s vast diversity of religious/ethnic minorities were permitted under the more ‘secular’ approach of the Ba’athists, but with the introduction of a hardline Islamist rule, it leaves open the very real possibility for atrocities against Christians of all stripes, Druze, Alawites, and Jews, to name but a few.
Note also that some of the very first interviews permitted to the leader of this group, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, are found in Deep State mouthpieces (CNN and The New York Times). Enough said.
Oh boy — we seem to feature Canada in our news roundups pretty frequently these days. We sorely miss a time when Canada was a soft power and force for good in the world.
Our lament this week comes on the heels of Canada’s government cracking down on firearms again, banning another 324 models with the claim they “belong on the battlefield,” not in hunters’ hands. But here’s the kicker — Ottawa plans to donate the newly outlawed guns to Ukraine. This, despite the fact that these guns have a maximum 5-round capacity, makes them less-than-ideal for actual combat.
“Every bit of assistance we can offer to the Ukrainians is one step toward their victory,” Defense Minister Bill Blair said.
This move follows a 2020 ban that now covers over 2,000 firearm models. Meanwhile, gun violence in Canada keeps rising, with firearm-related homicides hitting their highest rate since 1991. The data points to legal gun owners rarely being to blame. Out of 342 firearm-related homicides in 2022, most involved illegal guns, often smuggled from the US.
Critics, including the Canadian Coalition for Firearms Rights, aren’t buying Trudeau’s gun policies. Youth-involved gun crime has surged 109%, driven by gang recruitment, while 85–90% of guns seized in crimes reportedly originate from US states like Ohio, Florida, and Texas.
Then, there’s the $42 million spent on Trudeau’s gun buyback program — without a single firearm purchased from a Canadian to date. Critics are left wondering if these bans are targeting the right problem or just aiming for political optics.
To end on a bit of good news, the desperate attempts by the World Health Organization to ram through a pandemic treaty before Donald Trump’s inauguration failed once again.
Dr. Meryl Nass of Door to Freedom reports:
The continuation of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Body's (INB's) "resumed" session of its 12th official meeting is yet another dud.
Amid a desperate attempt to pull a rabbit out of a hat and conclude some kind of Pandemic Treaty this week, to be rapidly followed by a special WHO meeting of either the World Health Assembly or a Council of Ministers to adopt the Treaty—the best laid plans of mice and crooks have again fallen through.
After the 12th INB meeting in November, a “resumed” session was desperately planned for December 2-6, in an undisclosed scheme to get the Treaty adopted before Trump took office. You can see that this week’s “resumed” meeting was created hurriedly, ad hoc, after the failure of the November meeting. The schedule did not have a December meeting listed.
This week “stakeholders” were allowed into the INB meeting every morning to provide comments, then ushered out while small groups met in an attempt to iron out disagreements in a different format. It didn’t work.
In case you missed it
Here’s what was happening on Collapse Life this week:
Let us hope that Canada has the looming election sooner than later. Every day is another day of engineered collapse.
I looked over the recent list of banned firearms, and none of them are suitable for combat. They would only be suitable for training. The 5 round capacity could be increased, but that is not the only factor that makes them no suitable for action.