RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.”

https://thefederalist.com/2020/08/26/the-democrats-public-shaming-is-now-coming-for-you/

In June of 2018, a spate of incidents occurred in which Trump administration officials were heckled at or asked to leave restaurants. This happened to then-Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen who was heckled at a DC eatery and then-Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders who was asked to leave a Virginia restaurant by its owner. A debate grew about whether such public shaming was an acceptable form of political speech. Many on the left argued it was.
One Democrat, Rep. Maxine Waters had no doubt about the just nature of this tactic, she said at the time, “Lets make sure we show up wherever we have to show up. And if you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them. And you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”
Other Democrats pushed back, albeit gently, against Waters’ rather extreme remarks but now it appears Waters’ approach is gaining momentum, not in regard to members of Trump’s Cabinet, but rather against any person that refuses to obey the orders of Black Lives Matters activists. This week a viral video emerged of a woman being harangued by a large, mostly white, BLM crowd, screamed at, with people right in her face because she refused to raise her fist in the air in a sign of solidarity.
To call this shift from shaming politicians to shaming regular citizens predictable is a vast understatement. It was always the logical end of the road Waters was laying out. After all, if political disagreement is enough justification for screaming at a person in power, why not a person you suspect of help putting them there? In the case this week, which was one of many, the young woman was actually supportive of BLM, but her refusal to raise her fist was sufficient to make her a target.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/08/kevin-clinesmith-guilty-plea-russia-probe-ly

He went to great lengths to lie to a federal court and, when caught, lied by saying he didn’t really intend to lie.

Author’s Note: This is the last of a three-part series (see Part 1 and Part 2).

To recap, in June 2017, as the FBI was preparing to submit a fourth sworn application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to surveil former Trump-campaign adviser Carter Page, FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith came up with a story to conceal Page’s history as a CIA informant.

On June 15, a CIA liaison had told Clinesmith that Page had been a witting informant who reported information to the agency, a status denoted by a classified digraph (a two-letter symbol). Clinesmith, however, disingenuously claimed to have been told that Page was never a CIA informant; rather, he was purportedly an American who unwittingly passed information to the CIA by communicating with an unidentified third person who was an actual CIA informant. This was a distortion of what the CIA liaison had told Clinesmith.

He concocted the story, nonetheless, by fixing on the liaison’s use of the word encrypt. In its intelligence reports, the FBI routinely conceals (i.e., encrypts) the identities of Americans whose information is incidentally captured because they communicate with third parties who are FBI informants or surveillance targets. Clinesmith purported to construe the digraph as signifying that the CIA had concealed Page’s identity for a similar reason — i.e., he was not source, but he had dealt with someone who was a source.

Clinesmith studiously declined the CIA liaison’s offer to discuss the matter further, for that would have made it impossible to feign confusion. But he still had to get his fictional version of Page’s status past two officials.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/08/how-do-we-save-people-tyranny-lockdown-katie-hopkins/

Prager U is looking at the impact of lockdown on our mental health and asking, “Was it worth it?”

In the last 30 days, around 40% of people have reported mental or behavioral health issues, 30% anxiety or depression, 26% trauma and stress and 10.7% have considered suicide.

You need to say it twice to stop yourself reading it like a shopping list. During lockdowns, one in ten people have considered suicide in the last 30 days. Look around you. One in ten.

We also know that statistically these figures will be an under-representation. People do not willingly share this kind of information about their darkest thoughts in hopeless moments. Suicide is a private thing, perhaps the most solitary act of all. Right up until what remains of you is found.

4 in 5 U.S. workers live paycheck-to-paycheck. What do you say to a father who no longer has an income to pay the rent? Or a mother made redundant in March with no money to buy food? For many of us work is about much more than satisfying bills, or a providing a home. There is dignity in work, and indignity in the losing of it. This is not unique to lower income homes.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/08/california-apocalypto/#slide-1

Power outages, fires, water shortages, rising taxes, crumbling and congested highways, dismal schools, lawlessness … I t is now August in California.

So we can expect the following from our postmodern state government. There are the now-normal raging wildfires in the coastal and Sierra foothills. And they will be greeted as if they are not characteristic threats of 500 years of settled history, but leveraged as proof of global warming as well as the state’s abject inability to put them out.

When the inept state can’t extinguish them as it has in the past, it suggests that it’s more “natural” to let them burn. Jerry Brown’s team told us that the drought’s toll — millions of dead trees and tens of millions of acres of parched grass and calcified shrubs on hillsides — provided a natural source of food and shelter for bugs and birds and thus need not be grazed or thinned or harvested. And so the wages of drought could be in a sense good for an “ecosystem” that otherwise proved to be green napalm for the people of foothill communities.

We can expect power outages, because we don’t believe in releasing clean heat to make energy. Note that we do not mind people heating up in their 108-degree apartments without power. The planet is always more important than the non-privileged people who inhabit it.

For some reason, solar panels don’t create much power when the state is engulfed in dust, haze, and smoke.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/08/26/four-covid-19-charts-democrats-cant-let-you-know-about/

If the Democratic National Convention made anything clear, it is that Democrats are entirely invested in making the coronavirus pandemic look worse than it is in the United States.

Almost every speaker decried the response and blamed President Donald Trump for the scale of the disease in the country.

In his acceptance speech, Joe Biden said “Just judge this president on the facts. Five million Americans infected by COVID-19. More than 170,000 Americans have died. By far the worst performance of any nation on Earth.” Later he said, “We lead the world in confirmed cases. We lead the world in deaths.”

Fact checkers somehow missed Biden’s flagrant abuse of statistics. NPR’s “fact check” of Biden’s speech said only that, if anything, Biden undercounted the number of COVID-19 deaths.

But the number of infections and deaths is meaningless out of context. What matters is how many have died per capita, how many who’ve been infected have succumbed to the disease and where the trends are right now.

When you do that, the picture looks far less bleak.

The U.S. is far from the worst in the world in terms of the death rate per million population. The U.S. ranks 10th for per capita deaths worldwide, and notably better than the United Kingdom with its socialist health care scheme, and Sweden, which adopted a much more laissez-faire approach to the pandemic than the U.S.

On confirmed cases per million, the U.S. ranks 9th, but this is in part due to the extensive testing we’ve done. In fact, despite what Biden and Co. will have you believe, we are in the top of the pack when it comes to COVID-19 tests per capita. (Note also that only four of the other 36 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development nations do better than the U.S. on tests per capita.)

When it comes to the case fatality rate – the share of confirmed cases who have died – there is no comparison. Not only does the U.S. outperform most countries – as well as the world overall – the case fatality rate in the U.S. has been steadily declining.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-lockdowns-economy-pandemic-recession-business-shutdown-sweden-coronavirus-11598281419?mod=itp_wsj&mod=&mod=djemITP_h

Blanket business shutdowns—which the U.S. never tried before this pandemic—led to a deep recession. Economists and health experts say there may be a better way.

In response to the novel and deadly coronavirus, many governments deployed draconian tactics never used in modern times: severe and broad restrictions on daily activity that helped send the world into its deepest peacetime slump since the Great Depression.

The equivalent of 400 million jobs have been lost world-wide, 13 million in the U.S. alone. Global output is on track to fall 5% this year, far worse than during the financial crisis, according to the International Monetary Fund.

Despite this steep price, few policy makers felt they had a choice, seeing the economic crisis as a side effect of the health crisis. They ordered nonessential businesses closed and told people to stay home, all without the extensive analysis of benefits and risks that usually precedes a new medical treatment.

There wasn’t time to gather that sort of evidence: Faced with a poorly understood and rapidly spreading pathogen, they prioritized saving lives.

Five months later, the evidence suggests lockdowns were an overly blunt and economically costly tool.

https://spectator.us/playing-fire-portland-riots-west-coast/

Some conflicts begin with clear aims but morph into endless battles, the original motives forgotten. The timeless metaphor for self-sustaining battles is Jarndyce and Jarndyce, the inheritance case at the heart of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House. ‘Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on,’ he wrote. ‘This scarecrow of a suit has, over the course of time, become so complicated, that no man alive knows what it means… Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it.’

Now we have Portland v. Public Order. What Jarndyce was for the law, Portland is for the lawless. For over two months, young demonstrators have gathered each night in Oregon’s largest city. It began as a protest against police mistreatment of African Americans after George Floyd died in Minneapolis police custody and has morphed into a festival of violent nihilism, tinged with Marxism.

Across America, demonstrators have demanded police reforms and, quite often, dramatic cuts to law enforcement budgets — and the Democratic politicians who govern nearly all major cities have been woolly in their response. The demonstrations themselves were generally peaceful during daylight hours and often violent at night. Some protesters made political points, painting slogans on walls, pulling statues off pedestals. Others simply engaged in mindless destruction, such as defacing statues of abolitionists, or greedy opportunism. There’s nothing political about smashing store windows and grabbing an armful of shoes, computers, or TVs. Or about torching the corner grocery store.

https://www.tmj4.com/news/local-news/local-business-owners-find-livelihoods-smashed-following-second-night-of-kenosha-unrest

KENOSHA — More community devastation in Kenosha following another night of civil unrest which led to businesses and institutions in the city to being destroyed in the aftermath of the police shooting of Jacob Blake.

Along 60th street, near the Department of Corrections building at 13th Avenue, several businesses were destroyed.

The Department of Corrections building was set ablaze and crews worked to demolish the building on Tuesday morning. Hot spots and flames still shot out of a neighboring business, B&L Furniture, which was targeted by vandals overnight as well.

“It’s just all gone,” said Linda Carpenter as she cried into her son Scott’s arms. She and her family have owned their furniture shop for nearly 40 years before it was reduced to a pile of burning debris.

“My next job is to clean this up and then after that, I don’t have a job,” said Scott as he realized their livelihoods had been smashed.

On the same block, several car dealerships were destroyed and local businesses were busted into and vandalized.