This country is turning into Satans den. A Minneapolis sheriff has triggered an uncomfortable conversation by saying out loud what you are not supposed to talk about in Minnesota. "Out of control" gangs of Somali youths are terrorizing the city, and the mayhem is poised to get worse. Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher released a livestream video on July 6 decrying widespread violence by Somali gang members over the Fourth of July weekend. He also took the opportunity to criticize media outlets in the Twin Cities and the state for refusing to cover the problem. Fletcher "stated that the Somali gangs are responsible for at least 14 murders in the last two years as well as over 100 shootings - many of them at high-profile events like graduations and the State Fair. Fletcher also said in his promo video that he heard from a Minneapolis police officer who said that 20 percent of their homicides are now Somalis," local news site Alpha News reports. The situation is blowing up right in front of the public eye. "Investigators say Somali gang violence is growing quickly and now spans the metro [area], with 12 Somali gangs tracked from Minneapolis and St. Paul to St. Cloud, Apple Valley and Burnsville. Most of the violence involves guns, according to the Ramsey County Sheriff's Office," Fox-9 TV in Minneapolis reports. "Authorities say the gangs are still young and growing, with about 300 people involved right now." Ramsey County Deputy Ben Seidel said the Somali youth gangs don't operate like traditional inner-city gangs in the sense of being motivated by money. "From what I've seen... it's all about showboating. It's all about ego for 99% of it. They aren't selling narcotics. It's all about just gloating," Seidel states in the video. There's a history to Somali gang violence in Minneapolis that explains the seeming novelty of these officers' remarks. In blue-dominated Minnesota, criticizing the Somali community in any way is immediately defined as racist. The "R card" has been so weaponized in the state that health-care fraud was allowed to flourish for years, which may have cost American taxpayers up to $9 billion. There's one final element we should emphasize. As Somalis moved en masse to states like Minnesota, they retained their fiercely held tribal identities. https://www.zerohedge.com/political/sheriff-says-somali-youth-gangs-are-running-wild-minneapolis Less than a week into the US-Iran conflict, specifically on March 3, we began to see the writing on the wall: Tehran's leverage over the Strait of Hormuz would eventually erode. That would happen not only because the US military could systematically destroy IRGC's radar sites, coastal missile batteries and drone launch sites along the maritime chokepoint, but also because Gulf states would eventually respond with a generational infrastructure buildout, from new pipelines to coastal ports, designed to entirely bypass Hormuz altogether. The emerging theme gained momentum on Monday morning with a new Financial Times report stating that Dubai's state-owned ports and logistics giant, DP World, is considering a massive new port and container terminal on the UAE's east coast, in Fujairah, to bypass the Hormuz chokepoint. Shifting part of the port's capacity outside Dubai is a seismic change but not surprising given that UAE's Minister of Foreign Trade Thani Al Zeyoudi recently told Bloomberg in an exclusive interview, "We're moving toward having zero Hormuz dependency and that's regardless of whether it's open or not. It's going to open and we hope that will happen quickly, but we will not stop the new plan." The plan includes major investments in pipelines, rail, and road links from UAE ports in the Persian Gulf to Dibba, Fujairah, Khor Fakkan and at least one new harbor on the Gulf of Oman coast. With US-aligned Gulf states in the process of shifting critical energy and container supply chains away from the Hormuz area, this will only accelerate the erosion of Tehran's geopolitical leverage over the chokepoint. Americans no longer trust the legacy national media to report the news fairly or accurately. In fact, only eight percent of Americans have a great deal of trust in mass media. That figure is even lower among Republicans—sitting at a mere three percent. But it wasn’t always this way. All the way up through the 1990s, the majority of Americans trusted the media. When they turned on their TV, they felt like they were watching balanced programming that reflected their values. Reporters and journalists that lived in the same communities as their viewers anchored daily and nightly news shows at the local TV station. They reported facts and won awards for their gumshoe reporting. The media was respected. You can think about the broadcast industry as falling into two separate camps. On the one hand, you have hundreds of local broadcast TV stations that are licensed by the FCC to serve their local communities. On the other hand, you have companies known as national programmers, like Comcast and Disney. The latter create most of the national news, entertainment, and other programs that air on local broadcast TV stations today. Their national programs naturally reflect the values of the New York and Hollywood executives that produce them. This power imbalance has contributed to a steady decline in locally produced news—and with it, a weakening of the public’s trust in the media. To help ensure a healthy balance of power between national programmers and local broadcasters, the FCC adopted rules decades ago that operate as structural safeguards. One such rule is known as the national ownership cap. The cap generally prevents any one entity from owning so many TV stations that they could broadcast programming to more than 39 percent of TV households. The FCC adopted the cap to restrain the power of national programmers and their New York and Hollywood interests. The FCC wanted to deny national programmers the outsize power that could come from operating as both a national programmer and as an owner of TV stations with significant national reach. For a long time, the cap worked. But the broadcast and broader media industry has transformed dramatically in recent years. And the cap no longer constrains the power of national programmers. Instead, it prevents local broadcasters from competing on a level playing field. This is because national programmers no longer rely in the same way on local broadcast TV stations to distribute their programming. Today, national programmers can distribute their programming to 100 percent of the country. But the 39 percent cap continues to apply uniquely to the owners of local broadcast TV stations—forcing the market out of balance. Local TV stations are struggling to find the resources to produce live, trusted, and local news programming. On August 6, the FCC will vote on eliminating the outdated national cap in favor of a new case-by-case approach. If the FCC does not act, we do not need to imagine the bleak media future ahead. Just look at local newspapers. Much like the national cap, the FCC maintained an outdated rule for more than 40 years that limited investment in local newspapers. The FCC kept that rule in place until 2017, long after the economics of local journalism had shifted. Meanwhile, local newspapers shut down by the dozen... When it comes to broadcast news, our country could do with a little less Hollywood and a little more local reporting from communities across the country.
Sheriff Says Somali Youth Gangs Are Running Wild In Minneapolis:
Dubai's New East Coast Port Signals The Beginning Of End For Iran's Hormuz Leverage:
Exclusive—FCC Chairman Brendan Carr: Restoring Balance to the Broadcast Airwaves: