RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-myth-of-systemic-police-racism-11591119883?mod=itp_wsj&mod=&mod=djemITP_h

George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis has revived the Obama-era narrative that law enforcement is endemically racist. On Friday, Barack Obama tweeted that for millions of black Americans, being treated differently by the criminal justice system on account of race is “tragically, painfully, maddeningly ‘normal.’ ” Mr. Obama called on the police and the public to create a “new normal,” in which bigotry no longer “infects our institutions and our hearts.”

Joe Biden released a video the same day in which he asserted that all African-Americans fear for their safety from “bad police” and black children must be instructed to tolerate police abuse just so they can “make it home.” That echoed a claim Mr. Obama made after the ambush murder of five Dallas officers in July 2016. During their memorial service, the president said African-American parents were right to fear that their children may be killed by police officers whenever they go outside.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz denounced the “stain . . . of fundamental, institutional racism” on law enforcement during a Friday press conference. He claimed blacks were right to dismiss promises of police reform as empty verbiage.

This charge of systemic police bias was wrong during the Obama years and remains so today.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/06/britannias-riots-envy-katie-hopkins/

EXCERPTS

“Who could have believed a virus would cause politicians to lock down free people? How did the death of one black man in custody cause riots when ten were killed by their own hand in one weekend in Chicago? How is it possible for men to hate each other this much, to want to kill a stranger over a fight neither of them started? Where are all the powerful black voices who should be calling for calm?  Democrats keep pouring fuel on the fire even when their own house is ablaze. None of it makes any sense. ”

But as I watch events unfold across America, I feel strangely returned to that world again, halfway between conscious and not. Physically present but absented by other forces out of my control. Somehow I have woken up in a place where nothing makes sense and everything is warped beyond recognition. 

Like a dog, I can feel myself tilting my head at the screens in front of me, trying to make sense of the picture and noises coming out of them.

America is on fire. A small woman stands in her doorway trying to protect her stores, attacked by a mob wielding planks and stones. A man in white jeans is set on by looters who take running kicks at his head. A rock is flung with full force, a man’s life ended by a stranger who first set eyes on him just thirty seconds earlier. 

DC, NYC, Denver, Louisiana, Minneapolis, LA County, Atlanta, all fighting on the streets, fueled by the insanity of lives locked down, divided, unable to distinguish good from bad. It’s rather like a boiling ham frothing over with all the heat that’s been applied. If you could stop people to ask why they fight, why they threw that kick, that rock, looted this store, they would answer with a slogan or a name: George Floyd. 

https://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/

mas·​quer·​ade | \ ˌma-skə-ˈrād  (Merriam-Webster)

Definition of masquerade

 (Entry 1 of 2)

1a: a social gathering of persons wearing masks and often fantastic costumes

b: a costume for wear at such a gathering

2: an action or appearance that is mere disguise or show

It would be appropriate to begin this column with how and why masked customers chased a maskless customer from a Shoprite storei in Staten Island.. NY. However, the masked customers do not own the store (unless they’re shareholders), and so had no right to “evict” the maskless customer by mob action or otherwise. That should have been the freedom of the proprietor to do business with the maskless customer or not. The incident was a min-prelude of the anarchic mob mentality chaos now ravaging the country.  But governor Andrew Cuomo has given “permission” to private businesses  to maskless people from entering their stores. “  “That store owner has a right to protect himself,” Cuomo said at his daily Coronavirus briefing. “That store owner has a right to protect the other patrons in that store…”  But he has no rights, or otherwise. Rights? What are those? The concept is alien to Cuomo.

This is the same governor who ordered Covid-19 patients  be put into nursing homes which resulted in over 1,700 deaths. The state fudged the number of people who died from Covid-19 or from pre-conditions that had nothing to do with the virus. Exactly how many nursing home residents have died remains uncertain despite the state’s latest disclosure, as the list doesn’t nursing home residents who were transferred to hospitals before dying. The revised list shows that 22 nursing homes, largely in New York City and Long Island, have reported at least 40 deaths. Cuomo granted the nursing home executives immunity from the legal responsibility of causing patient deaths.

In the meantime, in San Francisco, which has joined the mask mania, passed a law that requires everyone to wear face masks when outside their homes, and especially in restaurants. And wherever else groups of people gather in small or large numbers .  This is not the San Francisco of Cyrus Skeen or Sam Spade..The San Francisco Chronicle published a guide for the simple-minded about the new distancing rules, comparing the social distance between people and a Muni bus, a cable car, sidewalk squares..

 One blog laughs at the purpose of healthy people wearing masks, to protect themselves when they are actually harming themselves by donning  masks ,  even while they’re driving behind a ton of glass and steel.

What is so obvious now are the totalitarian urges of so many state governors and municipal “authorities.”  The compulsion to render Americans  submissive,  helpless and  mentally “manageable” in a regulated society and in a statist political environment in which one’s actions and behavior are controlled by “authorities,” have bared the actions and policies motives and designs of the controllers. They want people to adopt and accept a lockstep mode of living.  They want everyone to  wear masks and look like they’ve been captured by alien invaders

NBC calls riots “protests.” Some on the left have argued that “rioting” is some kind of legitimate form of protest.”

One unintended consequence of universal lockdowns, “stay at home” mandates, and shutdowns is reported by Fox News is the rise in sexually transmitted diseases together with a rush on condoms in Canada. If and when the virus “crisis” has passes, there will be a new “baby boomer” generation come the end of 2020.

I end this column with a note of levity. After reading all of today’s news I had to grant myself a much needed chuckle.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/the-left-should-be-careful-with-its-riot-rhetoric/

“Justice excuses violence” is a self-destructive maxim that risks producing new atrocities.

Last week, the nation was stunned by the senseless murder of George Floyd at the hands of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. Politicians and pundits on both sides of the aisle decried the slaying, and it didn’t take long for protestors across the country to take to the streets. Sadly, some recent anti-brutality protests have devolved into seemingly random displays of theft, property damage, arson, and assault. Yet through all this chaos and destruction, the Left has not found much to condemn with regard to the rioters. Indeed, left-wing intellectuals have tended either to explain away the crimes of violent protestors or to justify them as righteous and inevitable.

Before considering the implications of such rhetoric, some examples of its prevalence might be useful. On Saturday, Northwestern University professor Steven Thrasher argued in Slate magazine that “the destruction of a police precinct is not only a tactically reasonable response to the crisis of policing, it is a quintessentially American response, and a predictable one . . . property destruction for social change is as American as the Boston Tea Party and the Stonewall Riots.” Nikole Hannah-Jones, a New York Times journalist who recently received a Pulitzer Prize for her work on the 1619 Project, tweeted out a more subtle endorsement of the riots: “I hurt for the destruction like everyone else. But the fact of history is non-violent protest has not been successful for [black] Americans.” Perhaps Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, has mustered the moral will to condemn the violence and destruction of the radical left? Quite the contrary — the furthest Biden has gone is to state that burning down communities is “needless” and unnecessary.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/dominating-the-streets/

Right now providing security must be a higher priority than law enforcement.

Since the revolution in policing that began in the early 1990s, we have had a generation of peace and prosperity. Without the rule of law — i.e., without order, without the presumption that the laws will be enforced — that kind of societal flourishing is not possible.

We are seeing now what happens when the rule of law breaks down. It is frightening, but it is hardly unprecedented, even in modern history. Bryan Burrough’s spellbinding history Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence, which I reviewed for NR about five years ago, reminds us that in 1972 alone, there were 1,900 bombings in the United States, carried out, for the most part, by domestic terrorist groups and enraged individual American citizens. Regrettably, the radical “small-c communists” were not ultimately regarded as the sociopaths that they were. They eroded public support for our war effort in Vietnam, wrote the history in which they were lionized as social-justice icons against racist America, and triumphantly marched into academe, where they have taught and influenced the sociopaths who are making mayhem today.

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

Truth or Consequences was a long-running American game show, originally hosted by Ralph Edwards. If the contestant could not complete the “truth” portion there would be “consequences,” generally an embarrassing stunt. In 1950, Ralph Edwards announced he would host a show from the first town that changed its name to Truth and Consequences. On April Fool’s Day 1950, the town of Hot Spring, New Mexico voted to become Truth and Consequences.

“Quid est veritas?”, asked Pilate of Jesus. To Christians, truth is the word of God, for whom His son Jesus bore witness. For Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the “central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society,” while the “central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”

The United States is a multi-racial and multi-ethnic country. We are White, Black, Native American, Asian, Hispanic and Pacific Islanders. According to the U.S. Census, 350 languages are spoken in the U.S. We identify as Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and multiple other religions. We come (or came) from most every country in the world. Yet, despite those differences in heritage, as Americans we have fundamental interests in common. We live under a Constitution that consumes only forty-one pages, at least in my copy – a Constitution that restrains rather than enables government. We live in a country where liberty is prized above all else; where fundamental rights are guaranteed. under the rule of law. We have a government comprised of three co-equal branches, and a military to safeguard us from foreign enemies. We have police forces to carry out our state and local laws. And we have a judicial system to assure laws are adjudicated fairly and equitably, and to protect us from those in government, be they politicians, bureaucrats or police who use power for their own purposes.

https://www.steynonline.com/10312/the-case-of-the-topless-taioseach

Across the Irish Sea, the London press continues its frothing over lockdown breaches by Dominic Cummings. If you’ve never heard of him, he’s Boris Johnson’s Rasputin. I don’t know him, although a few years back I took his wife Mary (a great-granddaughter or some such of the fourth Earl Grey, Governor General of Canada) to a John McCain campaign event preceded by a burger at the Littleton Diner in New Hampshire. But her hubby’s rise to Fleet Street hate figure has largely passed me by: the media bigwigs regard Cummings as Boris’s brain, and loathe him for Brexit and for December’s Tory landslide. Then came the lockdown, and the perfect cudgel: a few weeks back, Mr and Mrs Cummings felt the Covid coming on and, concerned about who’d be around to care for the kid, decided to take their four-year-old autistic son to stay with his grandparents a hundred-and-thirty miles away.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/06/01/quelling-insurrection/

EXCERPT

But what is going on now has transcended Floyd’s death. What started in Minneapolis and has spread to other cities is no longer a “protest.” Rioting, arson, and looting are not protesting injustice. It is no longer about race. It is no longer about civil rights. It has become insurrection, pure and simple.

The insurrectionists may use Floyd’s death as a fig leaf for their actions but their actions are an affront to the rule of law, upon which republican government rests. The First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees “the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” It does not protect rioting, arson, and looting. It does not protect mob rule, which as Abraham Lincoln warned in his Lyceum Speech of 1838, is the very antithesis of republican government.

Section 4 of Article IV of the Constitution reads: “The United States shall guarantee to every state in this union a republican form of government, and shall protect each of them against invasion; and on application of the legislature, or of the executive (when the legislature cannot be convened) against domestic violence.” Today, domestic violence threatens the very foundations of republican government.

The United States is a federal republic, which means that the first line of defense against insurrection is the government of the various states. But if governors are unable or unwilling to quell domestic insurrection, the federal government has the responsibility to act.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/06/01/no-trump-should-not-rescue-cities-again/

When looters threatened to bring their mayhem and destruction from the city of Chicago to my suburb on Sunday, our town’s leadership acted quickly. Snow plows were used to block access to the major shopping mall and big-box outlets; police SUVs and undercover cars patrolled heavily-traveled streets carrying cops with riot gear. Stores and restaurants, which had just reopened on Friday after a nearly three-month shutdown, closed again. Suspicious cars congregating in vacant parking lots adjacent to strip malls were hustled away.

Our police chief—Tim McCarthy, the secret service agent who took a bullet for Ronald Reagan in 1981 and saved the president’s life—could be heard on the police scanner calmly managing a multifaceted operation to keep people and property safe. While cities across the country, including the nation’s capital, continued to burn, my suburb of 58,000 residents, like many throughout the Chicagoland area, was unharmed.

Why? Because our law enforcement officers knew they had the support of our political leadership and the residents. Further, people were prepared to defend their businesses and families if necessary.

The Party of Lawlessness

But that is not the case in many urban areas, big and small, across the country. Police have been ordered to stand down; there was no plan or preparation as the thugs advanced. (The police chief of Raleigh, North Carolina said she would “not put an officer in harm’s way to protect the property inside a building.”)

The same Democrats who just a few weeks ago threatened beach walkers, churchgoers, and other disobedient social distancers are giving a wink and a nod to arsonists, looters, and attempted murderers.

Democrats belong to the party of lawlessness—and by law, I mean rules that have been subjected to a recorded vote by elected officials, not CDC guidance on mask-wearing. Open borders, empty jails, voting rights for noncitizens, uncollected debt are just a few features of their anarchist utopia. No wonder Democratic politicians only give lip service in condemning the looters; they share a mutual contempt for the ideals on which the country was founded and a common mission to fundamentally transform the country and all its institutions to yield to their America-hating point of view.

Why, then, should we be compelled to rescue them as violence continues? Why should we not watch in smug satisfaction as they are hoisted with their own petard? Of course, it tugs at the heartstrings to see shop owners in Minneapolis weep at their looted livelihood. Yes, innocent children are caught in the fray. But this is the culture Democrats not only created but want to put on steroids after the 2020 election.

The people who live in American cities—a mix of very wealthy whites and low-income minorities is the common demographic—elected far left political leadership and not by a slim margin. Jacob Frey, the mayor of Minneapolis, won in 2017 with 57 percent of the vote by defeating another Democrat. Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney won last year with more than 80 percent of the vote; ditto for Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti. Republicans don’t even bother to run. This is the story in nearly every city in America.

To flip the script: you bought it, you broke it.

https://asiatimes.com/2020/06/the-economics-of-civil-unrest/

Economics doesn’t explain everything. Heartbreakingly high rates of incarceration, illegitimacy, disease and poverty among black Americans are tinder waiting for a spark like the death of Minneapolis resident George Floyd in police custody. “What the great French sociologist Emil Durkheim called “anomic suicide” is the Great Plague of our times. Self-destructive behavior in the form of opioid addiction, alcoholism, and violent behavior is destroying the lives of large parts of the US population,” I wrote in this space March 30. 

Nonetheless economics does tell us something, and the chart below gives context to the riots which have wracked American cities during the past several days.

Thirty years ago the United States had twice as many workers in factories than in restaurants, hotels and other leisure and hospitality businesses. Over those 30 years the number of manufacturing workers fell by about half and leisure-and-hospitality employment doubled.  Then came Covid-19, and all the employment gains of the past 30 years evaporated in two months (these are April data, and the picture has worsened since then).

Minority workers in the United States benefited from an employment boom during the Trump Administration, and black unemployment fell to just 5.8%, the lowest level in American history, thanks in large measure to the availability of low-skilled service industry jobs. These jobs disappeared the fastest and are least likely to come back in the foreseeable future, as Americans save more of their income and avoid crowded public places like restaurants.