RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/06/11/yes-lets-defund-the-police-at-the-epa/

Democrats have met the enemy, and it is the police. Well, not all police. They love the heavily armed federal police at agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency.

Just days after George Floyd died in the custody of the Minneapolis Police Department, Democrats managed to compile a sweeping police reform bill that would, among other things, limit “qualified immunity” of police officers, lower the limits on what constitutes excessive force, create a national registry of police misconduct, bar the use of “no-knock” arrest warrants, and limit the transfer of military equipment to police departments.

Meanwhile, Democrats around the country have been talking about defunding the police, with some proposing to shift resources from law enforcement to social services.

But none has proposed imposing similar restrictions on federal officers. And no Democrat is talking about defunding them.

Even some on the left have noticed this disparity. The leftist Slate.com published an article last week complaining that “while Democrats seek to rein in local law enforcement, they have given the most powerful and least accountable police force in the country a free pass.”

The writer was referring to Customs and Border Patrol agents, another bête noir of the left. But the CBP is often dealing with violent lawbreakers.

What’s the excuse for federal agencies such as the EPA, Food and Drug Administration, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Department of Education, and National Institute of Standards and Technology to be purchasing military-grade equipment?

A 2016 study by Open the Books found that from 2006 to 2014, more than 60 federal agencies spent a total of $1.5 billion on guns, ammunition and military-style equipment. The EPA alone spent more than $3 million on such weaponry.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/06/culture-and-heritage-matter-too/

EXCERPTS

The notion that cultural heritage should be protected during an armed conflict ought not be terribly controversial; the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, and the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, have enshrined the principle that historical monuments, educational institutions, and institutions of religious, not-for-profit, artistic, or scientific significance should be spared by combatants for the sake of the survival of our collective patrimony. This was understood even in late antiquity, as when the Byzantine general Belisarius, during the 549-550 siege of Rome, advised his adversary, Totilo the Ostrogoth, that:

Her monuments belong to posterity, and an outrage committed upon them will rightly be regarded as a great injustice to all future generations as well as to the memory of those who created them. Therefore consider well. Should you be victorious in this war, Rome destroyed will be your own loss, preserved it will be your fairest possession. Should it be your fortune to be defeated, the conqueror will owe you gratitude if you spare Rome, whereas if you demolish it, there will be no reason for clemency, while the act itself will have brought you no profit. And remember that your reputation in the eyes of the world is at stake.

…..the property damage and cultural vandalism carried out in recent weeks — which has even been visited on monuments to figures like Winston Churchill, Mahatma Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln, Tadeusz Kościuszko, and Robert Gould Shaw — has been perpetrated by those deemed sympathetic by the media. Thus to express even the slightest qualms about the destruction of property, livelihoods, and heritage is treated as some sort of dog-whistle denial of human or civil rights. Meanwhile “bullets are whistling through the galleries” once again, but this time it is not just Dadaists on the societal fringe who are cheering it on. I am not entirely sure how a humane culture can persist on such terms, and I have absolutely no idea how cultural institutions can carry out their traditional missions as repositories of our collective heritage in such an environment, as calls to “decolonize” the collections, stacks, and curricula of museums, libraries, and universities mount, and as even the most anodyne monuments are systematically toppled or defaced.”

https://babylonbee.com/news/nike-releases-commemorative-shoe-to-honor-looters

Nike has released a commemorative shoe to honor those looting and burning down buildings across the country.

The Nike Loot Force One comes packed with features the company says will help people loot safely and efficiently. From cushioned soles to make sure you make it through shattered windows without getting your feet cut to a detachable swoosh that can be thrown at business owners or police officers like a Batarang, the shoe is the ideal footwear for those looking to incite violent riots and also coincidentally get some free stuff.

“We stand in solidarity with those looting stores and getting free stuff to show how much they care about justice,” said a Nike representative. “To that end, we are releasing this $250 pair of shoes some Chinese lady made for 30 cents.”

https://pjmedia.com/columns/victor-davis-hanson/2020/06/10/the-bitter-irony-of-revolutions-n514539

The ancient Greeks created new words like “paradox” and “irony” to describe the wide gap between what people profess and assume, and what they actually do and suffer.

Remember the blind prophet Teiresias of ancient drama. In the carnage of Athenian tragedy he alone usually ends up foreseeing danger better than did those with keen eyesight.

After a catastrophic plague and endless war, ancient democratic Athens was stripped of its majestic pretensions. Soon it was conducting mass executions — on majority votes of the people.

Throughout history, revolutions often do not end up as their initial architects planned. The idealists who ended the French monarchy in 1789 thought they could replace it with a constitutional republic.

Instead, they sparked a reign of terror, the guillotine and mass frenzy. Yet the radicals who hijacked the original revolution and began beheading their enemies soon were themselves guillotined.

It was not democracy but rather the dictator Napoleon who put an end to French domestic unrest.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/06/08/the-worst-progressive-idea-yet-hey-lets

Awful ideas have sprung up from the craziness of this annus horribilis like poison mushrooms after spring rain. But no idea is as bad as Big City mayors and their D.C. Democrat allies calling for the abolition of police departments. Do they not understand that, without enforcement, there can be no rule of law? Or is that the idea?

The left’s war on the very idea of the law now seemingly knows no bounds.

Politicians have all but declared open season on their police departments, even as they decry the mayhem, chaos, death and destruction from more than a week of violent protests nationwide following the tragic death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Unless you’ve been quarantined without access to the internet, you know that Floyd died while in the custody of the Minneapolis police as an officer kneeled on his neck.

There has been no trial, no official investigation of Floyd’s death, and yet the all-left Minneapolis city council has already proposed a solution: Defund the police department.

“We are going to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department,” says a June 4 tweet from City Councilman Jeremiah Ellison. “We are going to dramatically rethink how we approach public safety and emergency response.”

Progressive Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey opposes the idea. He thought he might prevail when he addressed an abolish-the-police crowd in his city over the weekend. He was wrong. He was booed, jeered and taunted, and forced to endure what more than one media outlet referred to as a “walk of shame” as he departed.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/09/if-you-want-to-know-what-disbanding-the-police-looks-like-look-at-mexico/

The rise of vigilante groups in Mexico offers a hint of what happens when institutions fail and civil society collapses. America should be paying attention.

One of the most visible and insistent demands of the Black Lives Matter movement is the abolition or disbandment of the police—or at the very least defunding them, which taken to the extreme would amount to the same thing. “Abolish the police” has become a rallying cry among protesters and a litmus test for elected officials seeking to ally with them.

What comes after the police have been abolished remains unclear. Protesters and politicians alike are hazy on details, preferring instead to talk about “reimagining public safety” and throwing around vague terms like “community policing.”

Of course, in concrete terms what would happen if a city actually disbanded its police department, as the Minneapolis City Council pledged to do over the weekend, is that the county sheriff’s office or the state police—or perhaps even federal law enforcement—would step into the vacuum and the city would have almost no say in how it was policed or what policies county and state law enforcement agencies adopted.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/not-so-retiring-retired-military-leaders/

In a time of crisis, their synchronized chorus of complaints, falsehoods, and partisan appeals to resistance threaten the very constitutional order they claim to revere.

Sometimes retired generals are deified. Ulysses S. Grant and Dwight D. Eisenhower won two presidential terms in landslide elections.

At other moments, war heroes such Generals Douglas MacArthur and Curtis LeMay were vilified as near insurrectionaries for their blistering attacks on sitting presidents.

In such a climate, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which became effective law in May 1951, prohibits active generals from disparaging their commander in chief — in the way perhaps MacArthur had bitterly pilloried then-president Harry Truman over the Korean War. Article 88 of the UCMJ makes it a crime to voice “contemptuous words against the President, the Vice President, Congress, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of a military department, the Secretary of Homeland Security, or the Governor or legislature of any State.”

But no one quite knows, and debate continues over, whether such codified prohibitions on free expression apply to retired generals receiving military pensions. Yet, given the spate of recent “contemptuous words against the President” leveled from retired generals, it seems that few worry about regulation AR 27-10 of the code: “Retired members of a regular component of the Armed Forces who are entitled to pay are subject to the UCMJ. (See Art. 2(a)(4), UCMJ.) They may be tried by courts-martial for offenses committed while in a retired status.”

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

The framework of a civil society is comprised of multiple threads, representing common traits like etiquette, respect for one another, accountability, deference to one’s parents and teachers. These customs are woven, along with art, music and literature, to form a nation’s cultural fabric. Culture includes traditions, knowledge of one’s own history and the history of one’s country – the good and the bad. It is what allows a civil society composed of those from myriad backgrounds, races, religions and opinions to amicably live together. Without the ability to civilly debate, darkness falls.

In the political world, there have always been extremists who refuse to comply with rules of civility that bind us. Those generally represent fringes of society. But extremism has become more mainstream, as political correctness, victimization and safe places have proliferated on our nation’s campuses. We have lost a moral sense of universal values. For example, the permitting of protesters in the wake of George Floyd’s killing was right. The failure to condemn and confront violent rioters and looters was wrong.

Gerard Baker, in last weekend’s Wall Street Journal wrote about the old liberal order being under siege: “A basic tenet of the old liberal order is the toleration of views we find detestable.”  Today, illiberal Leftism compels submission to identity politics. How else to explain Joe Biden’s contemptuous outburst: “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/06/we_have_entered_a_lookingglass_world.html

We live in an age characterized by belief — that is, belief in things that do not exist, belief in complete figments of unanchored imagination, abstractions that have no contact with or bearing on reality. Call it the age of irrealism, of pervasive virtuality, of estrangement from the objective world.

Consider several popular notions or beliefs, memes as they are sometimes called, which operate as delusions erroneously confirmed as fact.

There are more than two sexes, biology notwithstanding. Indeed, there are “57 Varieties” of gender. Also, in contradiction, gender is a “social construct.”
Islam is a “religion of peace.”
The university campus is aswarm with female victims of rape and sexual assault.
The planet is entering a carboniferous period as temperatures rise to unsustainable levels.
There is an organized and historical campaign in the Judeo-Christian West of men against women known as the “Patriarchy.”
There is a vast movement of White Supremacists ruthlessly oppressing those of other races and creeds.
America is bedeviled by institutional racism.
There is no such thing as truth.
Looting, vandalism and physical violence are legitimate forms of civil protest.
The value of people derives from their membership in a group rather than from their status as unique individuals.

We have entered the looking-glass world. None of these beliefs correspond to reality, as every sensible person knows.

I am out of town for a brief vacation.