RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/community-based-proactive-policing-works

Many advocates of “defunding the police” contend that too many police encounters with civilians concern trivial matters. Defunding proponents worry that poor decisions by officers can escalate tensions and lead to unnecessary uses of force. They argue that the police mandate should be more narrowly focused on responding to “serious” crimes, especially violent felonies. All other matters should not be considered police business. This premise has gained a receptive hearing in our political climate. Most people instinctively support the idea of leaving management of serious felonies to the police, who are certainly less likely to get into trouble if their job is simply to arrest violent felons.

But American policing has tried this idea before, and the results were disastrous for communities and police agencies alike. If history is any guide, confining police focus to serious crimes will do little to manage those offenses—and the strategy may further damage the relationship between police and citizens.

In the early 1900s, American policing was in turmoil. Political patronage largely determined which officers were hired, fired, and promoted. Officers themselves were often underqualified, poorly trained, and inadequately supervised. The mid-twentieth century saw a wave of policing reforms across the United States. Reformers sought to remove corrupting influences and to professionalize police with a more specific mandate. Thus was born the image of the “professional crime fighter”—the impartial law enforcement officer, objectively remote from citizens, who could bring to justice those accused of serious crimes. Radio cars, the 911 system, and “rapid response” emerged as the primary means to carry out this narrowly defined mission, which contained within it the seeds of future problems. “Police business” meant serious crime, and “real police work” meant patrolling in cars, waiting for calls about felonies in progress. Officers were discouraged from paying attention to minor disorder and other community problems. Citizen requests for assistance with such issues were thus easily ignored, dismissed as “social work,” or hastily (and ineffectually) handled.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-7-31-new-york-in-financial-fantasy

The blue state progressive political model consists of an endless list of government spending and redistribution programs, expected shortly to deliver perfect fairness and justice among all people, all financed by an assumed ever-increasing gusher of tax revenues. Then along comes the coronavirus: the productive economy gets intentionally suppressed, tax revenues plummet, and then what? Are we now expected to cut back on the government programs so recently touted as the sine qua non of human moral advancement? Worse, are public servants — those selfless individuals giving their lives to the righteous cause of human advancement through government spending — now to be laid off? Or have their pay or benefits reduced?

All of the blue states are currently facing this circumstance to greater or lesser degree, but none more so than my home state of New York. A June Report from researchers at Arizona State and Old Dominion Universities, cited at Bloomberg here, projected an annualized average decline in tax revenues among the states of 20%, but with New York leading all states with a projected 40% decline in tax revenues. Even if the decline turns out to be well less than the 40%, we’re still talking about a large part of the support for most-expensive-in-the-nation spending programs in areas like Medicaid, housing, and K-12 education. What’s the plan, Governor Cuomo?

Good New Yorker that he is, Cuomo’s brain is just incapable of contemplating substantial cuts to state spending or the state workforce, even in areas like Medicaid and K-12 education where our state spends double or more per capita the average of the other states. Nor are meaningful tax increases really an option — we’ve basically already maxed out on the potential for squeezing big money out of a handful of the richest citizens. So there’s really only one option: the federal government just has to step up and pay our bills.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/summer-cultural-suicide-sports-movies-schools-go-woke/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=

Sports, movies, and schools go woke. And broke?  

Cultural suicide used to be a popular diagnosis of why things suddenly just quit.

Historians such as Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee cited social cannibalism to explain why once-successful states, institutions, and cultures simply died off.

Their common explanation was that the arrogance of success ensures lethal consequences. Once elites became pampered and arrogant, they feel exempt from their ancestors’ respect for moral and spiritual laws  — such as the need for thrift, moderation, and transcendence.

Take professional sports. Over the past century, professional football, basketball, and baseball were racially integrated, and they adopted a uniform code of patriotic observance. The three leagues offered fans a pleasant respite from daily barroom politics. As a result, by the 21st century, the NFL, NBA, and MLB had become global multi-billion-dollar enterprises.

Then hubris ensued.

The owners, coaches, and players weren’t always racially diverse. But that inconvenient truth did not stop the leagues from hectoring their fans about social activism — even as they no longer honored common patriotic rituals.

All three leagues have suffered terribly during the viral lockdown, as American life mysteriously went on without them. And they have almost ensured that they won’t fully recover when the quarantine ends. Many of their often-pampered multimillionaire players refuse to honor the national anthem. In the NFL, players will now broadcast their politics on their helmets. They will virtue-signal their moral superiority to increasingly turned-off fans — as if to make sure that their sources of support flee.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/07/30/the-misery-compact/

The wisecrack in MAGA world is that coronavirus hysteria and the catastrophic consequences of related lockdowns have an expiration date: November 4, 2020.

That, of course, is the day after the presidential election, which our political experts currently predict will be won by Joe Biden. Panic over the flu-like virus will disappear; power-grabbing governors will ease house arrest orders; children will go back to school; face coverings will be torched; and the news media’s coronavirus dashboards will be archived for history.

Further, inner-city unrest magically will be cured. Antifa thugs will go back to Starbucks or their bedroom in mom’s Westport mansion or their Ivy League dorm rooms. 

Crisis over.

But that scenario is more than just the cynical view of Trump supporters wary that the current turmoil is the latest attempt to oust the president from the Oval Office—it appears to be the election strategy of the Joe Biden campaign, the Democratic Party, and the news media. And they are making no effort to keep it a secret. 

“[I]f Trump wins a second term—especially if that victory relies on another rural surge to overcome massive opposition across the big metros—the chaos in Portland might look like only the preliminary skirmish for an even more incendiary collision to come,” threatened Ronald Brownstein, a senior editor for The Atlantic, in a recent column.

In other words, rednecks, mayhem, and destruction will continue unless Bad Orange Man goes back to Mar-a-Lago in January.

Reversals of Fortune

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/07/hydroxy_hysteria_reaching_a_fever_pitch.html

COVID-19 can cause a fever, but nothing like the fever of hysteria gripping broadcast and social media over hydroxychloroquine, a potential treatment for the Wuhan flu. Ever since President Trump mentioned hydroxy as a possible therapeutic, the media have castigated it as worse than rat poison. They’ve criticized any use of it in a constant barrage of fear porn, telling everyone that this 60-year-old drug would kill anyone who dared take it.

When Trump mentioned he was taking hydroxychloroquine as a preventative, Fox News crank Neil Cavuto had a seizure, telling his audience, “I cannot stress enough. This will kill you.” Tell that to those Americans taking hydroxy to the tune of five million prescriptions written each year.

Hydroxy was FDA-approved in 1955 and is taken for lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. FDA approval means the approved drug is both efficacious and safe. All of a sudden, after 60 years, the FDA decided hydroxy is no longer safe because of, “serious heart rhythm problems and other safety issues, including blood and lymph system disorders, kidney injuries, and liver problems and failure.” If it is so unsafe, why did the FDA not rescind its 60-year-old approval?

It is worth noting that diseases treated by hydroxy for the past half century can cause these problems as well. As can COVID, which if severe, can also cause death. So, the FDA deems it safe to treat those sick with lupus and autoimmune diseases with hydroxy but not those sick or hospitalized with COVID.

That makes much sense as blaming both heat and cold, blizzards and droughts, on global warming. But that’s what happens when medicine is practiced by bureaucrats beholden not to science but to politics.