QUESTIONS ASKED AND ANSWERED: “Is the Biden Administration at War with Israel?”

The behavior of the Biden administration towards Israel is all the more worrying in that at the same time, it places itself in a weak position regarding negotiations with Iran and seems ready to make a deal with the mullahs’ regime at any price, in a resolution that has already been called “less for less,” or, worse, “less for more.”

Which also answers another question: Was it inevitable that Iran would go nuclear? “That the Iranians negotiators in Vienna probably have known that all along may explain their sense of confidence, if not arrogance in the talks. They recognize that an America bidding farewell in the Middle East, tired of wars, and led by an elderly and weak president and a divided and anxious Israel, is not an America ready for a shootout at high noon. At least Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu gave the impression that they were.”

AND THE HITS JUST KEEP ON COMING: Jussie Smollett faces $130k lawsuit from City of Chicago and separate filing from Osundairo siblings.

THE CHICOMS ARE SUPER CEREAL ABOUT CREATING MANBEARPIG! China Develops Humanized Pigs to Simulate COVID-19 Infection for Future Testing of Vaccines and Drugs.

Chinese scientists from the Institute of Microbiology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (IMCAS) announced the discovery of a scientific process that created humanized pigs where they could infect with the novel coronavirus and use it for research.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences is the world’s largest research institution of its kind, presenting their humanized pigs first in a study titled “Establishment of a Humanized Swine Model for COVID-19,” which was published in August in the journal Cell Discovery. It promoted genetically modified pigs with high similarities with the human body for COVID-19 research.

I blame Al Gore:

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): A friend texts: “BTW re the Chicom humanizing pigs for covid research. OK, I’m not going to make any cheap jokes about who’s a pig and who could use humanizing in the Chicom. But doesn’t that start to sound a little like where the superbad swine covid originates? This is a bad Pogo comic … or a really good one, I guess.”

CALLS GROW FOR CHICAGO STATE’S ATTORNEY KIM FOXX TO RESIGN AFTER SMOLLETT VERDICT.

ROGER KIMBALL: Civilizational Suicide, Not Omicron, Is Killing Us.

Early on in our experience of Wuhanomania, many commentators, including me, noted the pertinence of Farr’s Law in understanding the behavior of the “novel coronavirus.” William Farr’s name has receded from the commentary on the disease, but the pertinence of his model has not. Epidemics, Farr noted in 1840, follow a predictable bell-curve-like course. They are born, rise in virulence, and then recede. They do this with or without human intervention.

As I noted at the time:

“Our panic has destroyed trillions of dollars of wealth, impoverished millions, and handed much of society over to the machinations of socialistically inclined bureaucrats. It has also precipitated a huge and irresponsible disgorging of federal funds, the baneful effects of which will be felt for decades if not generations.”

That was in April 2020.

One of the most percipient commentators on COVID is Aaron Ginn, a Silicon Valley technical writer. In March 2021, Ginn predicted that when the COVID crisis was finally over, we should expect “massive confirmation bias and Pyrrhic celebration by elites. There will be vain cheering in the halls of power as Main Street sits in pieces. Expect no apology, that would be political suicide. Rather, expect to be given a Jedi mind trick of “I’m the government and I helped.’”

It’s too early to say whether Ginn will be proved right, but all indications are that he will. Commenting on Ginn’s prediction at the time, I invoked the political philosopher James Burnham, who famously observed that civilizations tend to end not because they are invaded by an external enemy but from an inner collapse. “They are not murdered; they commit suicide,” I wrote, and went on to observe that “The really scary thing about this latest health scare is not the disease but the unexpected depths of passivity it revealed.”

Some things never change.

On the other hand, when the potential for a mid-term shellacking looms, it concentrates even the most stubborn of minds wonderfully:

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Related: The rich and powerful thrived as the rest of us suffered in the year of lockdowns.

JOE CONCHA: Amid multiple crises, Biden runs to NBC’s safe space with Jimmy Fallon.

NEW CIVILITY WATCH: Stephen Colbert Keeps Wading into Fox News Christmas Tree Being Lit on Fire in the Most Cringeworthy of Ways.

Fox News’ Greg Gutfeld took the unfunny joke in stride, responding that it is “already beating [Colbert] in the ratings.” The tweet has performed far better than Colbert’s.

Colbert also went after Fox News during his monologue on Wednesday night’s show, as he called for “thoughts and prayers,” and it got worse from there. “Now, I know what you’re thinking, but the ghost of Hugo Chavez has an alibi,” Colbert joked. “Of course, this never would have happened if the tree had a gun. Give a squirrel a gun or something like that.”

The host also went after a former Fox News host, Bill O’Reilly. “Homeless and mentally ill? Oh my God, the fire was set by Bill O’Reilly! So it doesn’t look like this holly jolly arsonist was politically motivated, but Fox News is still going to eight maids a milk it,” Colbert joked, also making fun of the suspect.

Tamanaha, as Joe Marino and Jesse O’Neill reported for the New York Post, is indeed mentally ill. “Oh, he’s a nut. I can’t control him,” Richard Tamanaha of Hawaii said about his son. “Mentally, he’s not all there.”

Notice how the rival networks are egging on further arson, as long as it doesn’t happen to their office building. (See also: CNN’s Atlanta offices last year. “Riots for thee, but not for me,” Amy Holmes wrote at the time for Spectator World, when the radical chic crowd saw the urban destruction they called for get way too close to their stylish homes.)

What could go wrong, this time? When You Condone Chaos, You Condone the Consequences of Chaos, Freddie deBoer wrote last month:

At the time of the Kenosha riots, many many people along the left-of-center, including otherwise reformist liberals, endorsed riots to some degree or another. I know quite a few people who were willing to say that riots were just good on the merits, and there were also many saying in some terms or another that these particular riots could not be judged by progressive people due to what had inspired them. This sentiment stretches back a long way but has picked up steam in the last decade and the past year and a half particularly. Here’s a pro-riot piece and here’s a pro-riot piece and here’s a pro-riot piece and here’s a pro-rioting interview and here’s a pro-looting interview and here’s a riots-aren’t-necessarily-good-but-they-do-good-things piece and here’s a both-sidesy rioting piece and on and on. (And this is merely hilarious.) Pro-rioting sentiment is perfect for our edgelord media; it makes for good, click-farming headlines and engages in the kind of moral simplicity and righteous hectoring that defines our current culture.

Well, look: chaos is chaotic. Bad shit happens when people riot. When you create environments where anything can happen… anything can happen. Some people are going to take advantage of that opportunity to do things that you don’t like. You can’t endorse spasms of directionless violence and then complain when some of it plays out in a way that you hadn’t intended. This seems totally obvious to me, and yet so many out there want to both condone riots and condemn their chaotic outcomes. It’s like putting on music and getting mad when people dance.

The left-liberal stance towards political violence, at present, is beyond confused. . . . For many posers on the left antifa is less the expression of authentic political strategy and more a tool to define oneself as an aesthetic radical. If you go to various protests and riots and encounter the self-defined antifascists there, I can assure you very few of them will be remotely interested about what happens in the courts at all. Because – and I’m sorry to break this to you romantic types – most people who self-select as antifa in 2021 are just bored white people attracted by the possibility of an excuse for mindless violence.

Related: How Journalism Abandoned the Working Class. “For a long time, the notion that America is an unrepentant white-supremacist state—one that confers power and privilege to white people and systematically denies them to people of color—was the province of far-left activists and academics. But over the past decade, it’s found its way into the mainstream, largely through liberal media outlets like the New York Times, NPR, MSNBC, the Washington Post, Vox, CNN, the New Republic, and the Atlantic. What changed? Most obviously: white liberals. Their enthusiasm for wokeness created a feedback loop with the media outlets to which they are paying subscribers. And the impact has been monumental: Once distinct publications and news channels are now staggeringly uniform.”

More: Working-class people of color hate the riots the lefty elite keeps cheering. “The thing is, it’s a lot easier to encourage violence when the consequences happen to someone else. Too much of upper-class America is cocooned from real risk. For the people in poor and working-class neighborhoods where riots and looting tend to happen, the consequences are much more apparent. That’s why the cavalier attitude of so many Democrats toward riots makes sense. Democrats are now the party of Wall Street, Silicon Valley and upscale suburbs. The people who have to deal with consequences will have to go somewhere else politically. And they will.”

MUCH MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: Youngkin plans to withdraw Virginia from interstate climate pact.

21st CENTURY TINY MUMMIES: The French Dispatch and the New Yorker’s Collapse into Resistance Journalism.

Just as with the Michael Cohen story, Michael Avenatti seemed to be pulling levers behind the scenes. In May of 2018 [Ronan] Farrow had dined with Michael Avenatti. A week after the Blasey Ford accusation in September, Avenatti would accuse me and Brett of being present at 10n high school parties where girls were gang raped. Just before the accusation broke, I got a phone message from Jane Mayer, who along with Farrow is a Marquee New Yorker writer. Mayer breathlessly revealed that there were “shocking and horrible” allegations about me and Brett that were about to surface. She didn’t specify, and when I called her back three times, Mayer never picked up the phone.

A few months earlier, in the March 12, 2018 New Yorker, Mayer had published an exclusive piece: “Christopher Steele, the Man Behind The Trump Dossier” It was a profile of Christopher Steele, a former British spy who had produced a dossier claiming that Trump had been involved in scandalous behavior with Russian prostitutes and that the Kremlin was using the information to blackmail the president. In the years since, the dossier story has collapsed, with major media outlets like the Washington Post retracting large chunks of their coverage and adding editor’s notes to many stories.

Special prosecutor John Durham had revealed that the entire thing was produced and promoted by the Hillary Clinton campaign. In her New Yorker piece Mayer also reported that Robert Hannigan, head of GCHQ, a British intelligence agency, intercepted a “stream of illicit communications” between “Trump’s team and Moscow” at some point prior to August 2016. Hannigan then briefed CIA director John Brennan about these communications. Brennan later testified this inspired the original FBI investigation.

Journalist and Russiagate debunker Matt Taibbi raised a question that William Shawn or any other solid old-school editor would have asked: what did “illicit” mean? Taibbi explains: “If something “illicit” had been captured by GCHQ, and this led to the FBI investigation (one of several conflicting public explanations for the start of the FBI probe, incidentally), this would go a long way toward clearing up the nature of the collusion charge. If they had something, why couldn’t they tell us what it was? Why didn’t we deserve to know?”

Read the whole thing.

(Classical reference in headline.)

RIP: Interview with the Vampire Author Anne Rice Dies at 80 Due to Complications from Stroke.

MEL BROOKS WRITES IT ALL DOWN:

My grandfather Arthur Motzkin, a first-generation American Jew, liked to tell stories about his unlikely cameos in world history. When George Washington was crossing the Delaware and took a wrong turn, a voice piped up from the back of the boat: “Never fear! Arty’s here!” The day was saved. I thought about this tale while reading Mel Brooks’s new autobiography, “All About Me!” My grandfather was the same generation as Brooks—both were born in New York in the nineteen-twenties and served in the Second World War—and my grandpa’s running joke was, essentially, the same one that Brooks deploys, with a thousand times the wit, in his comedy routine “The 2000 Year Old Man” and in his 1981 film, “History of the World, Part I.” Possibly more than anyone else, Brooks epitomized American Jewish humor in the twentieth century, much of which rested on the idea that it’s funny when a kvetchy Jewish guy shows up where he doesn’t belong, which is most places. Case in point: when Kenneth Tynan profiled Brooks for this magazine, in 1978, the piece was titled “Frolics and Detours of a Short Hebrew Man.”

“When you parody something, you move the truth sideways,” Brooks writes in “All About Me!” The book, which comes out this week, covers his ninety-five years of life with a tummler’s panache: his childhood in Depression-era Brooklyn, his years writing for Sid Caesar, in the fifties, his creation (with Buck Henry) of “Get Smart,” in the sixties, his marriage to Anne Bancroft, and his remarkable run of movies, among them “The Producers” (he won an Oscar for the screenplay), “Blazing Saddles,” “Young Frankenstein,” and “Spaceballs.” More recently, he modelled social distancing with his son, the zombie-fiction writer Max Brooks, and began work on the long-awaited “History of the World, Part II,” which will be a Hulu series. When I spoke to him, he was sitting in his den on a bright California day, watching “a great big tan-and-gray owl in one of my cypress trees outside.” In our conversation, which has been edited and condensed, we talked about comedy, sandwiches, and the truths he’s told sideways.

Read the whole thing.

RIP: Al Unser, four-time Indy 500 winner, dead at 82.

CHRIS WALLACE LEAVING FOX NEWS AFTER 18 YEARS.

Wallace joins CNN+, where his politics seem like a much better fit:

UPDATE: “The suspicion that Chris Wallace leaked negative anonymous dirt to Brian Stelter for his anti-Fox News book ‘Hoax’ just multiplied by 10,” Tim Graham of the Media Research Center tweets.

OUT ON A LIMB: The media will never apologize for going all in on Jussie Smollett.

Not a single writer, or pundit, or CNN anchor, or MSNBC host, who pushed how grotesque this “attack” was will stare down the camera during one of their shows, and say “I was wrong — we need to be better.” They have had ample opportunity to do so. CNN’s Brian Stelter who once said both on air and on Twitter that no one was there, and “we may never know the truth of what happened that night” could have used his widely read (at least among his media cronies) newsletter to admonish his colleagues for abandoning journalistic ethics. But he did not.

Instead his toadie, Oliver Darcy, launched into an accusatory tirade against “bad-faith actors on the right” and Sean Hannity, for simply taking notice of their own screw-up. Darcy then fleshed this out more in a CNN piece: “How Sean Hannity and right-wing media personalities are using the Smollett verdict to attack the media.” If Oliver Darcy and his pals don’t want his worst nemesis pointing out their massive failure of journalistic curiosity, then perhaps they should stop proving their critics right.

Related: No Mea Culpa from Smollett’s Media Enablers.

As anyone who has ever been in a relationship can tell you, occasionally saying “I was wrong and I’m sorry” can go a long way. But the media can never say “We’re sorry.” Because then Republicans might pounce.

Consider this chart:

Eleven percent among Republicans? Thirty-one percent among independents? What media executive looks at this chart and doesn’t hear five-alarm sirens going off in his head? Answer: virtually all media executives, because becoming outspoken defenders of the Left has made the media very popular with Democrats, the cosseting and flattering of whom is now most of the media’s chief survival strategy. If no one trusts us except liberals, we’ll only say stuff liberals like to hear!

And then wonder how Trump happened. Or as Glenn wrote, right around this time six years ago: Choose the form of your destructor.

WE NEED A COMPLETE AND TOTAL SHUTDOWN OF CNN UNTIL WE CAN FIGURE OUT JUST WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON THERE: CNN producer who worked with Chris Cuomo arrested for luring mother and 9-year-old daughter to engage in ‘unlawful sexual activity.’

Related:

WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY: Social studies teacher cites Mill Valley’s first female, person of color, to be elected as mayor as example of local racism.

GREAT MOMENTS IN GASLIGHTING: Brian Williams in MSNBC Farewell Message: ‘I’m Not a Liberal or a Conservative.’

NewsBusters begs to differ: 11th Hour Hits Midnight: Here’s the Worst Moments From Lyin’ Brian at MSNBC.

GREAT MOMENTS IN GASLIGHTING: Biden on Approval Ratings: People Are Getting ‘Inaccurate Information’ ‘About Their Situation’ and Are Worried about COVID.

COVID, eh? How’s ‘shutting down the virus’ going, Joe?

JOE FRIDAY, CALL YOUR OFFICE! LAPD union head warns tourists to stay away from the city: “We can’t guarantee your safety.”

The head of the Los Angeles Police Department’s union has a message for tourists planning a trip to the city this holiday season – don’t do it. Don’t go to Los Angeles. That’s quite a message coming from the second-largest city in the United States. The rising crime rate running rampant across the country is hitting Los Angeles especially hard.

Jamie McBride, head of the union representing LAPD officers, said he can’t guarantee personal safety. His warning came with a movie reference.

“My message to anyone thinking about coming to Los Angeles, especially during the holiday season, is don’t,” Jamie McBride, the head of the LA Police Protective League, the union representing LAPD officers, said in a television interview. The message from McBride comes as what many residents and business owners view as a wave of crime slamming the city and surrounding areas.

“We can’t guarantee your safety. It is really, really out of control. I said it to people before, it’s like that movie ‘Purge,’ you know, instead of 24 hours to commit your crime, these people have 365 days to commit whatever they want,” McBride said.

McBride is referencing the 2013 horror film where all crime, including murder, is decriminalized one day of the year.

Related: Soros-Backed DA Wants Jacqueline Avant’s Killer to Serve Less Time. “What to do as the chief prosecutor when your city is in shock and outrage over the shooting murder of 81-year-old philanthropist Jacqueline Avant in her own home? If you’re Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon, you leap immediately into action with a fundraising email ‘asking for money to push through a bill removing extra prison time for using a gun during a crime.’”

Earlier: San Francisco’s vaunted tolerance dims amid brazen crimes.

BIDEN VOTERS POSTING THEIR L’S ONLINE: “Kamala Harris Needs to Get Serious,” says Peggy Noonan:

The Washington insider path is closed to Ms. Harris because she’s relatively new to town and her president’s experience dwarfs hers.

But here’s something she could do for Mr. Biden to be useful to his larger project. She could lend what skills she has to the public presentation of the administration’s stands. Mr. Biden isn’t strong there; he’s uneven in his attempts to explain and advance policy thinking.

To do this Ms. Harris would have to decide to become serious—to inform and immerse herself, meet with party thinkers, study her briefing books. Her current strategy, to the extent it exists, appears to rely on her sense of her own personal charisma—delighted laughter, attempts to connect personally, to convey zest.

She should speak instead with sincerity and depth. She shouldn’t confuse Happy Warrior with Hungry Operative.

Ms. Harris has never seemed especially earnest. This would be a good time for earnestness.

Would a new and serious Kamala Harris be spoofed? Yes, but it would be a better kind of spoofing. Let them say you look chastened: People would be relieved to see you look chastened. Let them snidely suggest you had previously hidden your serious side. You did. Let them say you’ve been humbled. You should be. So far you’ve got a lot to be humble about.

Get your mind off yourself, give America a break, get this thing turned around.

Good luck with that happening by the Klain administration. As Scott Johnson writes at Power Line, in “High Noonan: Return to Kamala edition,” “Noonan is pathetic. Noonan’s popularity as a Journal columnist may justify the editors’ persistence in turning over the paper’s valuable editorial page real estate to her on a weekly basis, but I trust they are embarrassed by it.”

JIM TREACHER: Wait, Jussie Is… GUILTY?!?

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Whoa.

Whoa.

So you’re telling me that this whole time, Jussie Smollett actually did it? He really is guilty? There were no crackers in MAGA hats prowling the streets of Chicago at 2 a.m. in subzero weather, carrying around ropes and bleach, hunting for TV actors to attack? You’re telling me Jussie faked the whole thing? You’re saying I’m not complicit in this hate crime due to the color of my skin, because there was no hate crime at all?

Wait, what???

I don’t know what to believe anymore. This changes everything. If you can’t trust Jussie Smollett…1

But seriously, folks, I’m genuinely surprised by this verdict because it’s obviously the correct one even though it happened in Chicago. This ditz committed the dumbest fake hate crime in history against himself, and now he’s been proven guilty in a court of law. It’s actually a relief to see justice being served. Not “social justice” or “racial justice” or any other kind of “justice” that apparently requires a modifier. Just plain old justice.

Jussie kind of gave the game away with the double-negative in his 2019 interview with one his media enablers, Robin Roberts of ABC: “I will never be the man that this did not happen to.”

On the other hand, as Treacher writes in his footnote: “Hold on. What if the whole Jussie Smollett thing is a Tenet-type situation? What if, instead of Jussie staging the attack on himself by hiring those Nigerian weightlifters, it was actually Jussie attacking himself? One day in the future, Jussie travels back in time to kick his own ass in 2019, but, see, the 2019 version of Jussie didn’t know about it because he hadn’t even had the idea yet. God, that’s confusing. I hate that movie. I need to watch it again.”

Heh, indeed. Read the whole thing.

DUMB AND DUMBERER: CNN And MSNBC Coverage of Smollett Verdict.

Look, no one expected the MSM to apologize for drawing conclusions about the Jussie Smollett in January 2019 when the supposed attack happened. Heck, we’re still waiting for them to apologize for believing the Russiagate hoax.  But to be honest,  a wealthy TV star who desires to get a sandwich from the local Subway at  2AM is a bit odd. That he decided to walk to the subway when the temperature was -16 degrees should have raised questions. Instead, they bought his pile of bull crap without asking any questions. After all, it was the perfect liberal media story— a victim who was both gay and black attacked by two white racists who supported Donald Trump. If Smollett didn’t make it up, someone in the liberal media would have. coverage of Smollett verdict

Now that a jury has convicted Smollett for making up the attack, the post-verdict reaction of the liberal mainstream media is just as stupid as the Smollett defense’s decision to have their client testify at the trial.  Their post-verdict coverage downplayed the Smollett conviction and beat up conservatives.

As reported by Fox News, CNN’s website said, “Jussie Smollett guilty on some charges.” SOME? He was found guilty on five out of six charges. That’s 83%, not some.    Meatloaf used to sing a song called, “Two out of three ain’t bad.” If two out of three ain’t bad, for the prosecution, five out of six isn’t some and has to be even better than “ain’t bad.”

Related: ‘You had to know it was coming’: Drew Holden delivers with monster thread on media, Dems, and lib blue-checks who ate up Jussie Smollett’s hoax.

Oh, and note the timing of when it all began:

THE 21st CENTURY IS NOT TURNING OUT AS I HAD HOPED: World’s largest pot brownie weighs in at 850 pounds for National Brownie Day.

A Massachusetts cannabis company is claiming it set a world record Tuesday when it baked a marijuana-infused brownie that weighed 850 pounds.

The company, MariMed, said the brownie contained 20,000 mg of THC, which would make it several thousand times stronger than the normal dosage sold in recreational cannabis shops.

The baking project honored National Brownie Day, which falls on Wednesday, and was part of a promotion for MariMed’s new brand of cannabis brownies, Bubby’s Baked.

At 3 feet wide across its square base and 15 inches tall, the brownie was said by MariMed to be the largest pot brownie ever created.

Maureen Dowd, your moment is now!

(Photo by MeriMed.)

SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST: Cold snap this winter could zap New England power grid: ISO boss.

If a polar vortex parks itself over New England this winter for too long, start chopping wood.

ISO New England CEO Gordon van Welie — a power player paid $2.3 million, according to tax filings — warned Thursday such a cold snap could knock out the grid.

“People need to be prepared,” he said during an ISO video briefing. “I’m not trying to cause undue alarm, but there are vulnerable supply issues.”

Topping that fear-factor list is the price and supply of natural gas — the region’s lifeline — with prices soaring in Europe and Asia. Warm weather forecast for next week and possibly the rest of December has eased that worry.

But van Welie stressed it’s a Texas-sized freezing across the region that worries him. Last February the power grid in the Lone Star state left millions without power in subzero temperatures and hundreds died.

“We rely on an energy supply chain that is quite fragile,” he said on New England. “What if the weather doesn’t stay fine?” The forecast for this winter is calling for mild temps.

He added the “last thing we need” is people trying to recharge their electric cars if the polar vortex extends down to Massachusetts as it has done in the past.

No doubt, the Washington Post is busy decoding the racist dog whistle in that last sentence.

(Classical reference in headline.)

WHEN THE CRIME WAVE HITS YOUR FAMILY:

My wife and I are scrambling to find daycare for our 16-month-old son. We’ve had a “nanny share” up until now, which means we and another couple employ a nanny for both couples’ kids and split the cost. Our nanny is wonderful, and she lives just a few blocks from us. But a few weeks ago, someone walked up her street spraying bullets into random houses. One of the bullets found its way into her living room, as she and her family ducked for cover. At that moment, she and her husband decided they were moving their family out of Oakland.

The shooting didn’t even make the local news. Apparently, in the Bay Area right now, you can walk up a residential street firing your gun into houses, and you still won’t be able to compete for attention with all of the other sensational crimes.

Perhaps you’ve heard about some of them or seen the videos.

Shoplifters casually walk into Walgreens stores in San Francisco filling garbage bags full of merchandise. They’ve spat on, bitten, assaulted, and thrown bottles of urine at employees.

The flashmob-style “smash and grab” robberies that originated here—in places like Union Square in San Francisco and the shopping plaza in affluent Walnut Creek—have now spread across the country.

Asian seniors are brazenly assaulted in the street; one octogenarian was body slammed to death. This week, an Afghan refugee—a father of three who had worked as a translator for the U.S. army—was shot dead near a playground in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill neighborhood.

And now freeway shootings are a thing. A few weeks ago, at nine in the morning, a 29-year-old mom on her way from Oakland to San Francisco for a job interview with her fiancé and two kids was randomly shot and killed in her SUV at the Bay Bridge toll plaza. In an interview, the victim’s mother recalled being heartbroken after hearing the story of an earlier crime, in which Jasper Wu, a two year-old who was sleeping in his car seat, was shot and killed by a stray bullet fired from another car driving in the opposite direction. It was not even two weeks later when she lost her own daughter the same way.

Related: Rise of Violent Crime: Democrats Have a Woke Rogue Prosecutor Problem.