RUTHFULLY YOURS

Not again! This past Saturday, a Chicago police officer responding to a 911 call shot and killed Quintonio LeGrier, an allegedly mentally ill man who had been threatening his father with a baseball bat and, bat in hand, was approaching the officer. The officer’s bullets also killed Bette Jones, an innocent bystander. There were 1,126 fatal shootings by police this past year. Half were shootings of persons with mental illness. In Chicago, as elsewhere, families and friends of the deceased called for better police training, echoing a call frequently made by mental-health advocates. But by limiting the proposed reforms to calls for police training, the families and public are letting these mental-health advocates off the hook for their own culpability.

The mental-health system has essentially severed the tie between gaining public mental-health funds and using them to serve the most seriously ill. Police chief (ret.) Michael Biasotti, former president of the New York State Association of Chiefs of Police, explained the phenomenon to Congress in 2014:

We have two mental-health systems today, serving two mutually exclusive populations: Community programs serve those who seek and accept treatment. Those who refuse, or are too sick to seek treatment voluntarily, become a law-enforcement responsibility. . . . [M]ental-health officials seem unwilling to recognize or take responsibility for this second, more symptomatic group.

Ever since the explosion of the Black Lives Matter movement, Americans have been bombarded with assertions that black men face a unique and dangerous threat — not from members of their own community but from the very law enforcement officers who are sworn to “serve and protect” them. Hashtags such as #DrivingWhileBlack and #WalkingWhileBlack have perpetuated a narrative that black Americans risk being gunned down by police simply because of the color of their skin. Using individual anecdotes of police misconduct and the now-discredited “hands up, don’t shoot” rallying cry, Black Lives Matter has built a case that American police are out of control.

The conservative response is clear: While no one believes the police are perfect, on the whole they tend to use force appropriately to protect their own lives and the lives of others. Moreover, racial disparities in the use of force are largely explained by racial disparities in criminality. Different American demographics commit crimes at different rates, so it stands to reason that those who commit more crimes will confront the police more often. Yes, there are rogue officers — and those rogue officers should be prosecuted — but the police are still a force for good in our society.

The Environmental Protection Agency opened 213 criminal cases last year, resulting in the conviction of 185 Americans and jail terms averaging 8 months plus fines. Violations ranged from fraud to illegally removing asbestos.

But the EPA has fired no one, nor even disciplined any of its employees for the massive toxic spill at a gold mine in Colorado last summer.

Daily Caller:

EPA enforcement data for 2015 shows the agency opened 213 environmental cases which resulted in 185 people convicted and sentenced to 129 years in prison. EPA has been opening fewer cases in recent years to focus more on “high impact” cases.

“The focus on high impact more complex cases results in fewer investigations overall,” EPA notes in its presentation showing agency enforcement activities for the year. EPA says its criminal enforcement focuses “on complex cases that involve a serious threat to human health and the environment or that undermine program integrity.”

Despite what you may hear from the culinary elite, genetic engineering is winning the day and gradually overcoming their “Frankenfood” fear-mongering. A flurry of good news this year ought to convince the public, more than ever, of the safety and the tremendous promise of this technology.

On Dec. 8 the Food and Drug Administration approved a new chicken that has been genetically modified to treat a rare and potentially fatal disorder called lysosomal acid lipase deficiency. The chicken, which won’t be available as meat, produces eggs with an enzyme that replaces a faulty human enzyme, addressing the underlying cause of the disease. Add it to the small but growing class of “farmaceuticals,” including drugs made by transgenic goats and rabbits.

In November the FDA approved, for the first time, a genetically engineered animal intended for human consumption. After a 20-year review, the agency gave the green light to the AquAdvantage salmon. The fish is an Atlantic salmon with a gene added from a Chinook salmon that allows it to grow faster with less feed. It makes aquaculture more appealing and could ease pressure on overfished salmon stocks in the wild.

In February the Agriculture Department approved the Arctic Apple, a new variety developed by silencing the genes that cause the fruit to bruise and brown when sliced. Two versions of the apple, the Granny Smith and Golden Delicious, could be in stores by the end of next year.

How shall we remember 2015? Or shall we try to forget it?

It is always hard to know when a turning point has been reached, and usually it is long afterwards before we recognize it. However, if 2015 has been a turning point, it may well have marked a turn in a downward direction for America and for Western civilization.

This was the year when we essentially let the world know that we were giving up any effort to try to stop Iran — the world’s leading sponsor of international terrorism — from getting a nuclear bomb. Surely it does not take much imagination to foresee what lies at the end of that road.

It will not matter if we have more nuclear bombs than they have, if they are willing to die and we are not. That can determine who surrenders. And ISIS and other terrorists have given us grisly demonstrations of what surrender would mean.

Putting aside, for the moment, the fateful question whether 2015 is a turning point, what do we see when we look back instead of looking forward? What characterizes the year that is now ending?

More than anything else, 2015 has been the year of the big lie. There have been lies in other years, and some of them pretty big, but even so 2015 has set new highs — or new lows.

This is the year when we learned, from Hillary Clinton’s own e-mails, after three long years of stalling, stone-walling, and evasions, that Secretary of State Clinton lied, and so did President Barack Obama and others under him, when they all told us in 2012 that the terrorist attack in Benghazi that killed the American ambassador and three other Americans was not a terrorist attack, but a protest demonstration that got out of hand.

“What difference, at this point, does it make?” as Mrs. Clinton later melodramatically cried out, at a Congressional committee hearing investigating that episode.

For the conservative movement, 2015 started out poorly and continued to be tough all year long. It wasn’t a legislative defeat. It wasn’t political tumult. It was the deaths of too many conservative luminaries who helped build the movement. As conservatives, we need to remember and honor these scholars, because it is all too easy to fall into the fallacy that the movement is defined by what current political candidates say it is. We cannot forget that the conservative movement predates politicians and was, in fact, built by great thinkers.

The conservative movement was built by intellectuals who developed not only the policies but, more important, the critical thinking that so powerfully influenced America’s future. Reflection on 2015 makes clear that we lost some titans, including Martin Anderson, Walter Berns, Harry Jaffa, Ben Wattenberg, Robert Conquest, Amy Kass, and Peter Schramm. They have left in the conservative movement a hole that will be difficult to fill.

Deterrence makes someone not do something. A parent promotes good teen behavior not just by providing cars and smartphones, but also by the explicit specter of graduated punishments that an adolescent does not wish to repeat, and thus chooses instead to abide by the house rules.

In terms of world affairs, a clear display of overwhelming military strength, and the real probability of being willing to use it, remind would-be aggressors not to start stupid conflicts — given that the possibility of winning something through war is overshadowed by the risk of losing far more. A world where everyone knows the unspoken rules as well as the moral and material relative strength and weakness of the various nations is a safer place for all involved.

Or put another way, deterrence, in the famous formulation of the 17th-century British statesman George Savile, 1st Marquess of Halifax, means that “Men are not hanged for stealing horses, but that horses may not be stolen.” Translated, that means that nations do not go to war just over Czechoslovakia, but that other nations are not swallowed up like Czechoslovakia.

When German foreign secretary Arthur Zimmermann, in a notorious 1917 telegram, offered the government of Mexico all sorts of rewards for attacking the southwestern United States and thereby sidetracking American support for the allies on the Western Front, Mexico balked. But its reason for backing off was not that it liked Americans or thought a preemptive attack would be unfair. Rather, President Carranza worried that Mexico lacked the military clout to take American territory. And even if it could have grabbed, say, Texas, Mexico did not have the power to control it — given a rowdy and armed English-speaking state population, one that Carranza worried was “better supplied with arms than most populations.” In other words, the Second Amendment and a frontier attitude helped to deter Mexico from taking up Zimmermann’s offer.

When South Florida Muslim leader Sofian Zakkout wants people to believe he is a man of peace, he speaks or writes it in English. But when Zakkout wants to show his true colors and curse Jews or call for violence against people, he does so in Arabic. This month, Zakkout’s real self came out once again, as he labeled Jews the “grandsons of monkeys and pigs,” while commemorating the 28th anniversary of Hamas.

Sofian Abdelaziz Zakkout is the Director of the American Muslim Association of North America or AMANA. While the organization may not be very well known outside of South Florida, AMANA is a major player for the Muslim community in the local area. In fact, Zakkout and his group have firm ties to two dozen mosques in the vicinity.

Because of Zakkout’s position of leadership, when he makes a statement, it needs to be taken seriously. In English, he will tell media outlets about how he is a man of peace, about how he was, for years, the co-chair of the Jewish Arab Dialogue Association (JADA). In Arabic, he will make statements which are quite the opposite, supporting and inciting hatred and terror.

This month, Zakkout has been hard at work spreading the vilest of anti-Semitism in Arabic.