RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/how-to-reform-policing-while-keeping-people-safe

Primed by the Covid-19-induced fiscal shortfall and catalyzed by the “Defund the Police” protests over the summer, the Los Angeles City Council will reduce the city’s police force by 350 sworn officer positions. This reduction comes after a planned $150 million cut from the LAPD’s budget, announced earlier this year. Officials have been scrambling to reorganize the force since.

Police forces across the country have been hit hard by layoffs, early retirements, and resignations. Seattle’s police chief resigned after the city council voted to reduce her force by 100 officers. Chicago’s police department saw its retirement rate jump to twice the normal level this year compared with the last five. Smaller cities weren’t spared: Asheville, North Carolina, had lost 13 percent of its force by September.

Officer ranks have been steadily declining. Between the late 1990s and 2016, the number of police officers per capita nationally dropped by more than 10 percent. Filling vacancies is not easy, as applications for sworn officer positions have dropped by more than half since 2010.

Well-staffed police departments are essential to maintaining public safety. A report from the Brennan Center for Justice found that increased numbers of officers in the 1990s reduced crime by an estimated 5 percent to 10 percent.

Most Americans—including 81 percent of black Americans—want a strong and effective police presence in their communities.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/12/21/leftists_hijacking_vaccination_rollout_144895.html

You were warned about this first in July. Now, it’s happening. On Sunday, the federal Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommended that seniors ages 65 to 74 be moved toward the back of the line for the COVID-19 vaccine.

The reason, says ACIP, is that “racial and ethnic minority groups [are] under-represented” in this age group. Put another way: Seniors are too white.

Vaccines are already being administered to health workers and nursing home residents. The question is this: Who comes next? ACIP wants to push 87 million essential workers — such as transit workers, supermarket employees and uniformed public servants — to the front of the line, forcing 32 million seniors to wait.

Vaccinating a majority of 87 million essential workers will consume the vaccine supply for several months.

Thousands of seniors will die needlessly if this decision goes into effect. ACIP actually admits as many as 6.5% more elderly will die over the next six months but dismisses that loss of life as “minimal.” Not if it’s your grandma.

A person 65 or older is at least 90 times more at risk of dying from COVID-19 than a young working-age person. Vaccinating the elderly first is the obvious strategy to save the most lives. ACIP says its twisted priorities are based in “fairness, equity and justice.” What the committee really means is “wokeness.”

Committee member Peter Szilagyi, from the University of California, Los Angeles, defends ACIP’s move, because “essential workers” include “a high proportion of minority, low-income and low-education workers.”

These left-wing academics are exploiting the pandemic as a launching pad for their redistributionist agenda. The lives of seniors — who need the vaccine the most — be damned.

Harald Schmidt, from the University of Pennsylvania, explains that “older populations are whiter.” He says “society is structured in a way that enables them to live longer. Instead of giving additional health benefits to … them, we can start to level the playing field a bit.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/12/dr-jill-and-dangers-scientism-bruce-thornton/

Essayist Joseph Epstein stirred up the “woke” commissars with an essay jovially advising Jill Biden from insisting on being called “Dr” because she has a doctorate in education. As Epstein pointed out, usually the demand to be called “Doctor” when one is not an M.D. suggests insecurity or unseemly vanity. After all, according to her husband, she sought out the degree because she was “so sick of the mail coming to Sen. and Mrs. Biden.” No matter. To Epstein’s critics, the “entitled” old white guy was “sexist” and “misogynist,” demeaning Mrs. Biden’s accomplishments in order to keep her in her “handmaiden” place.

Such “woke” dudgeon is so common that it is a dog-bites-man story, reported on only to provide progressives with opportunities for virtue-signaling, attacking their enemies, and feeling superior to the unenlightened. What’s more serious about this spat is the foundational flaw that runs through it–– our failure to separate real science from activities that reflect scientism: Dressing up ideological beliefs or even fads in the quantitative data and forbidding jargon of real sciences like physics or engineering.

Of course, the criticisms were all preposterous: slighting the EdD is an equal opportunity custom long embedded in Academe, where the “narcissism of small differences” is epidemic, especially for the American professoriate, which doesn’t enjoy the wider social esteem that European academics enjoy. Also, doctorates in education exist mainly as a way to boost a school-teacher’s salary, or qualify him to serve as an administrator. For snooty professors in traditional disciplines, the stink of the marketplace clings to the EdD.

But the deeper question is, why does a discipline like education even exist? Does anybody really believe that there are scientific truths from which this discipline derives? The reliance of educational theory on psychology and sociology should set off warning bells. While empirical information shows up in these fields, they are not “scientific,” but comprise philosophical theories dressed up in the numerical data and polysyllabic jargon that characterize real science. Disciplines whose topic is human behavior, interactions, motivations, or consciousness are particularly dubious, because few of these aspects of our humanity can be understood with the rigor and predictability of hard science.