RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/president-sending-troops-law-enforcement-to-kenosha/
The violence has to end, or it has to be ended.

President Trump tweeted early this afternoon (here and here) that, after consultation between administration and Wisconsin officials, Governor Evers has agreed to accept federal security and law-enforcement assistance. Thus, the president says he will forthwith be dispatching National Guard troops as well as federal law-enforcement — I presume (though he does not say) agents from the various Justice Department components that, in the main, are carrying out Operation Legend.

Let me just quickly repeat a few things I’ve been saying since late May, when the rioting began.

The prerequisite for enforcing the rule of law is the establishment of order. Law enforcement agencies — federal, state, and local — are capable of maintaining law and order, but not of establishing it. They simply do not have the resources to impose order if it has been lost due to insurrectionist violence. And trying to conduct law-enforcement operations when order has been lost is like the concept we used to ridicule in connection efforts to treat jihadist war as if it were a problem fit for courtroom adjudication — you can’t turn battlefields into crime scenes.

In our system, the president has not only the authority but the obligation to protect the people of states in which order has broken down and widespread violence, beyond the capacity of law enforcement to quell, has taken hold.

https://nypost.com/2020/08/25/we-could-beat-covid-19-before-a-vaccine-is-ready/

Is a vaccine the only way to return to normal after ­COVID-19? New research into the virus suggests not — that the infection rate may drop to tiny levels before then.

Since the spring, scientists have known the virus’s infection fatality rate — how many people it kills compared to the number it infects — is under 1 percent, perhaps as low as 0.2 percent. That lower figure translates into one death for every 500 people infected.

We have also known that deaths are seriously skewed by age. The media says older people are at “more” risk from the novel coronavirus than younger people. That’s true, but it understates the reality. Most people do not realize that the risks to people over 80 are hundreds or thousands of times higher than those younger people face.

The fatality rate for children, meanwhile, is very small. In July, Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said it’s about one in a million infected.

Of course, most of the media simply ignored Redfield’s comment — maybe because it would have made parents less afraid to send their kids to school.

But the fatality rate is only half the puzzle when scientists try to figure out what the final death toll from the coronavirus might be. And even with a small rate, the numbers are staggering. If the entire nation was infected, it would mean potentially 500,000 or more Americans dead.

https://www.city-journal.org/minneapolis-2040-plan

In the months before the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, a small group was doing its best to spread the message that the city was deeply racist. They were not protesters or looters, or the organized African-American community of the city’s soon-to-be-burned North Side, but rather the mayor and city council. Their focus was what might have seemed an obscure and technical topic: zoning. They were led by one-time San Francisco city planner Lisa Bender, president of the city council, a position considered almost as powerful as that of the mayor.

“We’ve inherited a system that both for decades has privileged those with the most and forgotten the people that we really have left behind,” Bender said. “And housing is inextricably linked with income, with all these other systems that are failing, especially in Minnesota, people of color.” She put forth a plan to relax single-family zoning and to permit more multifamily home construction in a city that was—at least pre-George Floyd—attracting millennials and increasing its population, anomalously for the Upper Midwest. Mayor Jacob Frey shared Bender’s view. The city, he told Politico, was perpetuating “racist policies implicitly through our zoning code.”

What might have been both an effective consensus reform and a change that could inspire other cities and suburbs to follow suit backfired, thanks to being tied—unnecessarily and unjustifiably—to alleged racism. The plan did not originate in the city’s black community, and black leaders in Minneapolis have not even mentioned it as part of what the city must do to expunge racism in the wake of Floyd’s death. It was driven by the city’s white progressive leadership.

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c

In cities across the country, it has been a summer of continuous protests, many of which have escalated to riots, arson, and looting. The protesters chant to defund the police, but as many of the protests have turned violent, police departments in affected cities have been overwhelmed with calls for assistance.  

So should protesters’ demands to “defund the police” be taken literally?  I spent some time looking into what proposals to “defund the police” actually entail, though I often wonder if protesters themselves know what their goals are. There definitely seems to be a divide between media and think tank commenters on the one hand, and the protesters in cities on the other.  

Consider a June 19 report from Brookings Institute. According to this Report, “defund the police” technically just means “reallocating or redirecting funding away from the police department to other government agencies funded by the local municipality. That’s it. It’s that simple.” Similarly, for The Cut, Amanda Arnold writes:

“Defunding the police does not necessarily mean getting rid of the police altogether. Rather, it would mean reducing police budgets and reallocating those funds to crucial and oft-neglected areas like education, public health, housing, and youth services.”