Tag Archives: predators

American Societal Decline: Michael Snyder points out the evil roaming our streets

Important Takeaways:

  • America’s societal decline appears to be accelerating. Hordes of predators are roaming our streets, drug addiction has risen to unprecedented levels, and crime is completely out of control.
  • [KPTV reports] A 29-year-old man named Negasi Zuberi recently kidnapped a woman in Seattle and took her 450 miles away to his house in southern Oregon…
    • “According to the complaint, this woman was kidnapped, chained, sexually assaulted, and locked in a cinderblock cell. Police say, she beat the door with her hands until they were bloody in order to break free. Her quick thinking and will to survive may have saved other women from a similar nightmare,” says Assistant Special Agent in Charge, Stephanie Shark with the FBI Portland Field Office.
    • The victim was eventually able to break down the door to the cell when Zuberi was away, took a gun from his car and escaped the home. She then was able to flag down a passing driver who called 911.
  • Decades ago, this sort of story would have been front page news for weeks.
  • So why hasn’t this case gotten more attention from our national news networks?
  • It is because cases like this have become extremely common in our day and age.
  • According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, there are 917,771 registered sex offenders in the United States and its territories.
  • Meanwhile, other forms of crime also continue to rise.
  • [CWB Chicago reports] On Sunday evening, hundreds of young people in Chicago went on an extremely alarming looting rampage…
    • A large group of young people, mostly juveniles, ripped through the South Loop on Sunday evening, looting a convenience store, storming a Dunkin, and fighting as they ran through the streets. It was the second time in days that groups of teens targeted the area along Roosevelt Road.
    • Chicago police supervisors, in a departure from previous “large group” situations, encouraged cops to lock people up. They did. A total of 40 people, including 37 juveniles were taken into custody during the incident, according to a CPD spokesperson. Officers seized three firearms from the arrestees.
  • All over America, theft has become an enormous problem.
  • It is being projected that theft will cost U.S. retailers more than 100 billion dollars in 2023, and many are responding by literally “locking up items”…
  • Unfortunately, our leaders just continue to make self-destructive decision after self-destructive decision, and we are all going to pay a very great price for their unwise policies.

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Monster swallows monster: Fossil reveals doubly fatal Triassic encounter

By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – In a warm shallow sea about 240 million years ago in what is now southwestern China, a large dolphin-like marine reptile attacked and swallowed an almost equally big lizard-like marine reptile in a savage encounter that left both beasts dead.

Scientists on Thursday described a fossil unearthed in China’s Guizhou Province that reveals this Triassic Period drama in exceptional detail and changes the understanding of “megapredation” in prehistoric seas.

While it long has been presumed that large apex predators preyed upon other big animals – megapredation is defined as feeding on prey of human size or larger – the Chinese fossil represents the first direct evidence of it, as demonstrated by a prehistoric animal’s stomach contents.

The fossil shows the skeleton of a 15-foot-long (5 meters) Guizhouichthyosaurus, a type of marine reptile called an ichthyosaur. Its body design married elements of a dolphin and a tiger shark though it lacked a dorsal fin, also boasting four strong flippers and a mouth full of powerful but blunt teeth.

Inside its stomach was the torso of a 12-foot-long (4 meters) Xinpusaurus, a type of marine reptile called an a thalattosaur. Its body design resembled a komodo dragon with four paddling limbs and teeth equipped for crushing shells. The Xinpusaurus was beheaded in the melee and its tail severed.

“Nobody was there to film it,” but it is possible to interpret what may have occurred between the two animals, said paleobiologist and study co-author Ryosuke Motani of the University of California, Davis.

The Guizhouichthyosaurus literally may have bitten off more than it could chew.

“The prey is lighter than the predator but its resistance must have been fierce,” Motani said. “The predator probably damaged its neck to some extent while subduing the prey. Then it took the head and tail of the prey off through jerking and twisting, and swallowed the trunk using inertia and gravity.”

Motani added, “These activities may have expanded the damage of the neck to the point it was fatal. The neck vertebral columns of these ichthyosaurs are quite narrow and once they could not hold the skull in place anymore, the predator could not breathe. Soon, it died not far from the site of the predation, where the detached tail of the prey lay.”

The fossil bore evidence of this broken neck. The prey in the stomach showed little signs of digestion, indicating the ichthyosaur died soon after swallowing it.

It is among the more dramatic fossils on record, joining others such as one showing the Cretaceous Period dinosaurs Velociraptor and Protoceratops locked in combat and another of the large Cretaceous fish Xiphactinus that had swallowed whole another sizeable fish.

Guizhouichthyosaurus was the largest-known marine predator of its time, about 10 million years before dinosaurs appeared. Its teeth, however, were not the type thought to be needed for megapredation: blunt rather than having cutting edges for slicing flesh.

“Its teeth look like they are good for grasping squids. So, it was a surprise to find such large prey,” said Peking University paleontologist Da-Yong Jiang, lead author of the research published in the journal iScience.

Motani noted that crocodilians also have blunt teeth and attack large prey.

“Megapredation,” Motani said, “was probably more common than we used to think.”

(Reporting by Will Dunham; Editing by Sandra Maler)

FBI director warns Facebook could become platform of ‘child pornographers’

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – FBI Director Christopher Wray said Friday that Facebook’s proposed move to encrypt its popular messaging program would turn the platform into a “dream come true for predators and child pornographers.”

Wray, addressing a crowd of law enforcement and child protection officials at the Department of Justice in Washington, said that Facebook’s plan would produce “a lawless space created not by the American people or their representatives but by the owners of one big company.”

Facebook intends to add encryption of wide swathes of communications on its platform.

His speech, which came ahead of an address on the same topic by Attorney General William Barr, ratchets up the pressure on Facebook as the U.S. and allied governments renew their push to weaken the digital protections around the messages billions of people exchange each day.

Wray’s speech is part of a renewed push by the American, Australian, and British governments to force tech companies to help them circumvent the encryption that helps keeps digital communications secure.

Debates over encryption have been rumbling for more than 25 years, but officials’ anxiety has increased as major tech companies move toward automatically encrypting the messages on their platforms and the data held on their phones.

In the past, officials have cited the threat of terrorism to buttress their campaigns again encryption. But as the Islamic State and other extremist groups fade from the headlines, governments are trying a different tack, invoking the threat of child abuse to argue for “lawful access” to these devices.

Facebook’s privacy-focused move, announced by founder Mark Zuckerberg earlier this year, is causing particular consternation because the platform is the source of millions of tips to authorities about child abuse images every year.

Zuckerberg, speaking on the company’s weekly internal Q&A Livestream, defended the decision, saying he was “optimistic” that Facebook would be able to identify predators even in encrypted systems using the same tools it used to fight election interference.

“We’re going to lose the ability to find those kids who need to be rescued,” Wray said. “We’re going to lose the ability to find the bad guys.”

However, many of those outside the law enforcement have applauded Facebook’s push for privacy and security. Academics, experts, and privacy groups have long worried that circumventing the protections around private communications would open dangerous vulnerabilities that could make the entire internet less safe — and leave billions of users exposed to abusive surveillance.

Wray steered clear of making any specific proposal, saying that “companies themselves are best placed” to offer a way for law enforcement to get around encryption.

(Reporting by Raphael Satter; Editing by Steve Orlofsky)