Covid Makes Them Do It

There is comfort to be found in self-delusion, especially when your delusion is shared among so many of your friends and admirers. Consider Lori Lightfoot, mayor of Chicago, the gutters of which are awash with the blood of shooting victims. As of this writing, 2,386 people have been shot and 434 murdered this year in the city, an average of twelve shooting victims and two murder victims every day.

The violence is for the most part is confined to neighborhoods on Chicago’s South and West Sides, but even residents in neighborhoods once considered safe are now dodging bullets. On Wednesday night, eight people were wounded when gunmen shot up a party bus in the Old Town Triangle neighborhood near Lincoln Park. It was the city’s third shooting with at least five victims in a six-hour period. A 15-year-old boy was killed in one of them. Thirteen more people were shot on Thursday, one of them fatally.

That he did.

Mayor Lightfoot consoles herself with the fantasy that this daily display of violence can be attributed to the Covid pandemic, which she claims has impinged on the criminal courts’ ability to keep lawbreakers in check. Anyone who doesn’t share the mayor’s desperation to believe this nonsense should read the refutation of the claim by the Chicago Sun-Times.

Like so many others in politics, academia, and the media, Mayor Lightfoot entertains this fantasy because she cannot publicly admit the uncomfortable truth about crime, which is that there are neighborhoods in Chicago, as there are in every large American city, where the only restraint on criminal predation is the presence of police officers able and willing to intervene in it.

Murder City.

For the past several years, most especially since the death of George Floyd last year, the American left, to include Mayor Lightfoot, has busied itself delegitimizing the police, portraying them as contributors to, not solvers of crime. This has motivated veteran officers to retire earlier than they might have, younger ones to leave the profession, and left those who remain on the job so dispirited as to be reluctant to engage in the type of proactive police work proven to reduce crime.

Consider the map above, taken from the Chicago Tribune’s website, on which each of this year’s murder victim is represented by a blue dot. The map resembles nothing so much as a petri dish choked with poisonous spores, with more being added every day. Viewed in this way, it’s easy to see the city’s murder problem as an abstraction, especially if one lives in a neighborhood where the dots are few or absent altogether. Putting aside any demographic patterns that might be inferred from the arrangement of the dots, suffice it to say that those neighborhoods where they are most heavily concentrated are those where the city’s social and moral fabric are most conspicuously frayed, and where effective police work should be most readily welcomed and encouraged.

Each of those dots represents someone who, until he was struck down (in most cases by gunfire) was going about his business with no idea what was about to befall him. And, almost as important as the lives taken, each of those dots is like a pebble plunked in a pond, with the ripples of anguish and sadness radiating out to the dozens of people who knew the victim and the thousands of others who every day live with the sound of gunshots and the specter of bloodstained sidewalks and fluttering strands of crime-scene tape in their neighborhoods.

For every shooting victim there is of course at least one shooter, someone who woke up in the morning and had his breakfast before venturing out carrying the gun he would use to deadly effect later on. He was unafraid of carrying that gun because he had, perhaps deliberately, perhaps inchoately, calculated the risks of doing so and found them acceptable.

They are acceptable to him because many if not most of the cops who patrol his neighborhood have similarly calculated the risks of stopping him and found them prohibitive. A good cop working any neighborhood comes to discern the good people from the bad, the pilgrims from the predators, if you will, the latter of whom can be divided into the dope dealers, the burglars, the robbers, and the shooters. And even when observing people he doesn’t recognize, the good cop can detect, through subtle cues in body language, those who are likely to be carrying a gun.

When he sees such a person the cop has a choice to make. He can pretend he hasn’t seen what he sees and drive on, or he can try to stop the man. The cop knows that if he tries to make the stop it can turn out in only a few ways, the first and least likely of which is that the man will put up his hands and say, “You got me, officer. I’ve got a gun, take me to jail.”

Failing this, the man may run and try to ditch the gun on the fly, or he may hold on to it while he flees, hoping to reach a safe place before the cop can catch up to him. Or – and this is where the risk assessment comes into play – the man may try to fight with or even shoot the officer in an effort to escape.

Is there anything it can't do?

If he is both skilled and lucky, the cop will win the fight or shoot before being shot. But even if he comes through physically unscathed he very likely will be thrust into a multi-year legal ordeal during which he, the cop, will be portrayed as a villain while the man he has vanquished, no matter how lengthy his rap sheet, no matter how contemptible his past, will be canonized into the litany of secular saints and remembered as “kind” and “generous” despite all evidence to the contrary, and who will be described as a “good father” when in most cases it would be more accurate to say he was merely a prolific one.

This is the world of Chicago’s cops, and of those in most other cities in the country. Until that changes, until politicians like Lori Lightfoot can admit the truth about what ails their cities, the bodies will continue to stack up in the morgues. In the meantime, Lightfoot and her ilk will cling to the belief that it is the pandemic that is responsible for all their cities’ woes, and that all will be well if we can just get enough people vaccinated.

Yes, there is a perverse comfort in self-delusion. Alas, there is no vaccine for it.

E Unum Pluribus, or Whatever

What do Covid lockdowns, energy re-dependence in “pursuit” of the chimera of “green” energy, BLM/Antifa/OFA "mostly peaceful" protests, and decriminalization of low-level crimes have in common with open borders, reversing Trump’s Middle East peace advances, and 70 years of wars we refuse to win all have in common?

Chaos. Why? Because when chaos serves the State, the State will encourage chaos.

What do those who work in government want? More government. What’s the most government?  A police state. What do you get when you have day after week after month after year of riots, murders, lockdowns and lawlessness? Voters demanding more security: a police state. Chaos is a win-win for government. Why else do you think we have so much of it?

Does any reasonable adult think that releasing thousands of violent felons can possibly have a result other than chaos? Or that the loss of tens of thousands of good-paying energy jobs and the millions of wage jobs (retail, restaurant, transportation) that evaporate with them can result in anything else? Or that anything other than chaos will come out of the restart of the ever-failing “two-state” “peace process” in the Middle East? Or that no-bail and shoplifting-isn’t-a-crime policies will result in low/no crime? Or that our constant wars for, literally, generations, introduce into  foreign lands anything other than chaos? Or the accelerating influx of illiterate immigrants to a first world economy can result in anything else?

Many hands makes a complete mess.

Welfare does what? Pays people not to work. The absurd Covid lockdowns served no medical or health-related purposes – and we know now that the political establishment knew this all along.  What do unemployed people do? Those working to further the Universal Basic Income agenda tell us these people will be free to express themselves in art, literature, music, to be the people they can become if they no longer are “locked into” a workforce.

Seen a lot of new art, music or literature in the past 16 months? No? Hmm… What have we seen in that time frame? Kenosha. Portland. Chicago. Riots, lootings, arson, murder. What do people do if they aren’t working? Look around: They burn cities, murder innocents and generally get in trouble. "Idle hands" has been a saying for millennia... for a reason...

This past month, evidently in celebration of Juneteenth (an odd holiday for lbacks and Democrats to honor as it celebrates the day Republicans freed the last of the Democrats’ slaves, in Texas), a peaceful twenty-something Puerto Rican couple in Chicago was dragged from their car and shot dead on the street. Many people watched. So did their children. Not violating the community standards of Facebook, this horrific murder was broadcast on that morally-upright social media platform for the world to see.

What was this shooting representative of? Chaos.

Portland has been burning most nights for over a year. Has the government stopped it? Our esteemed vice president, Giggles Harris. told us these riots must and should continue. OK – they have. Trump wanted to use the Insurrection Act to put down these rioters and murderers well over a year ago – but was talked out of doing so by… the political establishment.

Mostly peaceful violence.

How do we reduce chaos and resolve the situations in that breed it? Education, law enforcement, and criminal justice policies aimed at enforcing the laws our "representative" legislatures pass.

America has, inarguably, the worst public education of any first-world country. Democrats go on about how they believe in education and, fascinatingly, voters believe them. Democrats have owned education since FDR. If Democrats wanted better education, we’d have better education. If Republicans wanted better education, they’d make this point early and often in every single campaign. They don’t.

If the State did not want chaos, would this be the case?

We have laws against illegal immigration; interestingly, this is why it’s called “illegal.” Who refuses to enforce them? The political establishment.

We have laws against criminal behavior. If a cohort decides not to follow those laws, the refusal by the political establishment to lock them up will not cause those laws suddenly to be followed, to the consternation of all those cities that defunded their enforcement, resulting in the acceleration of murders and violent crime we see today. Oops.

What is the point in going to war? To bend another polity to our will; it’s what war is about. But if we aren’t going to do so – then the point of war is… what? To introduce chaos.

Sanctioned anarchy is a wonderful and profitable thing.

At the end of the day, what does chaos bring? Profit to leftist think tanks and advocates of lawlessness, huge profits off taxpayer monies to defense contractors. Profit to enablers of illegal immigration. Profit to “teachers” who can’t – and now simply won't -- teach. Government-mandated profits to those who seem  to think that sustainable energy is real (we used to call this a “perpetual motion machine,” and you can still find hawkers of them on the internet).

And what do these many and varied people do with these profits? Fund more government to keep the chaos coming.

Democrats buy votes with welfare and rioting and bad education. Republicans buy votes by going along with Democrat programs ("bipartisanship") and by invading the rest of the world to introduce... chaos. There is no money in peace; there is no money in a healthy populace; there is no money in public safety... unless first you introduce chaos.

Why does the government not want peace marked  by abundant energy, an educated and healthy citizenry, and laws – immigration, and other – passed by legislatures and then enforced? Because only an intelligent government is interested in meeting the needs of its constituency rather than "resetting" that constituency to meet the needs of government.

Does anyone think we have an intelligent government? Does anyone respect our lawmakers? Even campaign donors don’t: who respects someone they can buy?

If they’d just been straight with us over Covid, if we had an intelligent government treating us as responsible citizens, tens of thousands of lives would have been saved, millions of jobs and hundreds of thousands of businesses would not have been lost, and millions would not have been idled by welfare. How many millions of lives would have been saved had they been straight with us over foreign “wars?” How much prosperity will be lost due to the greendoggle?

What we need is an intelligent government that has our consent and will reduce chaos. What we have is chaos.

Watching Civilization Die, One Lie at a Time

It is a cliché to say that one first must correctly diagnose a problem to solve it. Let’s cliché:

Climate Change is not about climate. Covid lockdowns, masks and vaccines are not about a virus. Critical Race Theory is not about race. BLM is not about Black lives. Antifa is not about antifascism.

These are about culture; the only culture that has succeeded over the past millennium, the cultures and subcultures that have not, and the members of those cultures that hate our success – or are moving here to take advantage of it. (Illegal immigration isn’t about immigration; it’s about emigration. From failed cultures.)

By succeeding so completely where all others have not, Western civilization has made itself their target. In refusing to address the current pathologies as cultural, we are playing a game using rules by which we cannot win, a game different from the war waged on us and our success by our enemies: No one ever is going to win an argument over the immutable – and irrelevant – characteristics of race and sex. So why play?

It is perhaps ironic that the superiority of our successful culture has created and distributed technology to less-successful cultures showing not only that they have failed, but that they have failed so comprehensively that they may never be able to catch-up.

To paraphrase, “We are all living The Camp of the Saints now.”

If you can't join 'em, beat 'em.

“Climate change” is unsupported by facts or evidence; even the U.N. says it’s about re-ordering the global economy (i.e. Marxism), and not the climate.

Covid was (is) about grabbing power; why else the constant lies from Fauci, the CDC, NIH, the MSM and the DNC, while those “leading” us against the virus were unmasked at ball games, non-social-distancing at fancy restaurants and hair salons closed to the rest of us, and vacationing in Florida when we couldn’t get on airplanes?

Critical Race Theory is about forcing a successful culture to adapt to an appallingly, seemingly intentionally, unsuccessful culture. It has nothing to do with race other than the success of the racialists among us making bank on destroying their communities. If Blacks always have been oppressed, explain Frederick Douglass, Langston Hughes, Martin Luther King, Jr, Ben Carson, Colin Powell, Andy Young, Dick Parsons, Barack Obama. If whites always have been the oppressor, explain why the majority of welfare beneficiaries are white.

BLM? Looking at the subculture of African Americans we find that the incidence of illegitimacy was lower and the rate-of-entry to the middle class higher (i.e. a successful culture) before welfare than after. Paying people not to work, giving one an unearned living standard, kids never seeing Dad go to work does not capture creativity, perseverance and imagination or create a work ethic, leading directly to the failed subculture of the inner-city ghetto and to BLM, a subculture convinced that its members cannot succeed – so they’re killing each other and demanding we both celebrate and imitate their culture.

Who convinced African Americans of their inability to compete? The same cohort that has owned public education for 75 years and puts the worst schools and teachers in the inner city because that’s how much they care about African Americans. The same cohort running BLM, believing that a culture based on the always-failed Marxism can succeed. This time. If it’s done right. These “leaders” have indoctrinated three generations to a culture that only succeeds in failure and death. So they are getting failure and death.

Antifa? Nothing but a bunch of opportunistic, fascist thugs that any confident culture would crush.

Things will – can – only get worse until and unless we address them correctly.

Somebody with a dream lived here once.

Were I an educated member of a failed culture, say, China, that never invented glass (if you ever have wondered why no craters on the moon have Chinese names, this is why) but that last century murdered as many as 80,000,000 of its own and now cannot move forward without buying food from, and stealing the money and progress of, the West, or a member of a Third World culture practicing authoritarian socialism, I’d demand of my leadership what we once demanded in the West: honesty, the Rule of Law and capitalism. Because history proves that these – and only these – can create a successful culture.

Now that we know what is driving these pathologies, we need to be willing to stand up in the face of this nonsense: this isn’t about race, so stop. This isn’t about climate, immigration or a virus, so stop. Then enforcing “Stop” as hard as is necessary to end this attack on our culture – which we also call “civilization.”

We need to return to national confidence and assimilation, for confidence in and assimilation to our uniquely successful culture – which we required of our own and of immigrants from our founding until the 1960s – will lift all boats, regardless of race, creed, color, national origin, etc.

If we want to help the rest of the world, rather than invading it or subsidizing socialism, we should subsidize success: the Rule of Law and capitalism. And quit yammering about the idiocy of Climate Change, the nonsense of still-prevalent racism, and the anti-science lies of our “leaders,” locking down the world only to enhance their quest for totalitarian power at the expense of our liberty and prosperity.

Success – succeeds. Failure – fails. Culture is what our national division is about. It cannot be healed by accepting, prolonging or accelerating failed cultural choices. Acknowledge the reasons for success – and demand them. Acknowledge the reasons for failure – and stop making excuses for them.

Continuing to engage racists about race, climatists about climate, fascists about fascism, and liars about disease is counterproductive. The issue is culture, and it is on that field that must confront, and defeat, them.

When Police Get Woke, Society Gets Broke

One of the blessings of growing older is, when tensions roil the social landscape, being able to look back on the troubled times of an earlier day and say, “Those tribulations I survived, these I shall also.” I am a Baby Boomer, born in the late ‘50s to a World War II Navy veteran and a stay-at-home mother, both of whom were conservative Republicans who did their best to usher their children through the tumult of the ‘60s and ‘70s.

Nearly all of my friends growing up came from similar backgrounds, but we came of age as the Vietnam war came to its ignoble conclusion and as the Watergate scandal gripped the nation. It was a time when “questioning authority” was oh so fashionable among my generation, and, like nearly all of my friends, I rejected my parents’ conservatism and embraced liberalism, at least as the term was understood in, say, 1976.

I’m ashamed to admit it took some years to accept that my parents weren’t wrong about absolutely everything, and that the “authorities” I had so enthusiastically questioned and rejected had achieved that status for the simple virtue of having been correct. And I became a cog in the authority machine itself when I joined the Los Angeles Police Department after graduating from college, but even then it was only after a few years of patrolling the streets of L.A. that the scales fell from my eyes and I came to realize the liberalism I had embraced, far from improving the lives of those it purported to help, made them worse.

Los Angeles then.

I spent the greater part of my police career working in South Los Angeles, where I was confronted daily with the grim harvest of liberal policies that, however well intentioned in their origins, resulted in the dissolution of families and sent forth thousands of fatherless young men who, lacking guidance in the home, found it on the streets though membership in gangs like the Crips and the Bloods, both of which originated in Los Angeles and have since spread like cancer across the country.

The city’s gang culture brought horrific bloodshed to Los Angeles, most especially in South L.A. In 1976, the LAPD handled 517 murders. By 1980 the number had almost doubled, to 1,028, and when gang culture coalesced with the crack cocaine epidemic in the early ‘80s the result was even more explosive. It wasn’t until 1997 that the city’s murder total fell back below 700, and by 2010 the number was below 300, where it remained for ten years.

That reduction in violence was brought about largely through the efforts of police officers willing to go into the neighborhoods most affected by crime and confront those responsible for it. Yes, some of those confrontations were violent, and yes, it resulted in many black and Latino young men being arrested and sent to prison, as it was blacks and Latinos who committed 90 percent of the violent crime in Los Angeles, an uncomfortable but nonetheless persistent fact mirrored in any American city you can name.

There existed among police officers, in Los Angeles and elsewhere, an ethos that demanded we challenge the status quo that said violence and disorder were the inevitable byproducts of long overdue social transformations. These transformations were welcomed and applauded by the elites, but when a police officer sees a shooting victim take his last breath, when he sees the victim’s mother running down the street to see it too, he cares little for the opinions of elites fortunate enough to live and work safely distant from the violence they have fostered, and it arouses in him the will to act so as not to see such a scene repeated.

Or at least it used to.

L.A. now.

Since the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014, and most especially since the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis last year, police work has changed so radically as to be unrecognizable to those of us who worked the streets in the ‘80s and ‘90s. America’s police, already in retreat against the advancing woke mob, now recognize that their leaders have abandoned them and the battle against crime is no longer worth fighting.

But as demoralized as police officers are today, it is not they who are paying the heaviest price. If the Black Lives Matter movement has proved anything, it is that the only black lives that matter to its adherents are those few that are lost in confrontations with the police. The thousands upon thousands of others who die at the hands of their fellow blacks inspire no protests, no outrage, no calls for systematic changes, but rather are greeted with a blithe shrug of acceptance. The police, rendered inert by political overseers kowtowing to the mob, are now bystanders to the carnage, reduced to documenting murders while doing little to prevent them.

This is not an accident or an unfortunate side effect of an otherwise benign development. This is the aim of the modern left that now dominates the political, academic, and media classes who shriek to the skies whenever a police officer uses force against a member of some favored minority, but who stand mute when some member of that same minority murders another.

When police officers are no longer useful to fight genuine evils, they will be re-tasked to fight imaginary ones, as has in fact already occurred with cops enforcing mask mandates and other restrictions on liberties most Americans viewed as inviolable only a year ago. When this occurs – and the process is already well underway – those cops best suited to fighting violent crime will drift away from the profession and find employment elsewhere, to be replaced by the type of meek, enervated drones that reflect the political eunuchs ushering in this transformation.

This summer the country will experience violence at levels unseen in decades, and by the time it awakens from its woke torpor, there may be no one left who knows what to do about it.

Our Black Marxist Murder Spree

Only rarely do present circumstances so align themselves as to reveal the future with clarity. We are in such a period right now, and to those willing to open their eyes to it, the future staring back at them is bleak indeed.

I worked as a police officer in Los Angeles for more than 30 years, and people of my generation may recall with dread the crime wave of the late ‘80s and early '90s, when Los Angeles saw an average of three times the number of murders as have occurred in recent years. In 1992, the Los Angeles Police Department handled 1,092 homicides. Compare this figure with 2020’s total of 349 and you get an idea of how much safer the city became in 28 years, thanks largely to the efforts of the men and women of the LAPD. But even the 349 figure was a significant increase from 2019, when 253 people were killed in L.A. Will we soon look on 2020 as the good old days? All available evidence says yes.

I’ve been writing about the coming crime wave since 2014, when Michael Brown’s death in a Ferguson, Mo., police shooting gave rise to the widely circulated lie – still believed in some quarters – that he had been killed while trying to surrender. Brown’s death and the rioting the followed led to what Heather Mac Donald described as the Ferguson Effect, in which police officers shrink from proactive crime-fighting measures for fear of becoming involved in a controversial incident. The Ferguson Effect lives on, more destructively than ever.

Ferguson, Mo., 2014.

This fact is welcomed, even celebrated, by the Black Lives Matter organization and their myriad acolytes. BLM, formed in 2013 after the death of Trayvon Martin, became the leading voice in opposition to what had been the traditional responses to crime, i.e., arrests, prosecutions, and incarceration.

BLM’s influence has only grown in the years since, most especially after last year’s death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers, and today it is the puppet master of the far left. The news media, academia, and the entertainment industry unquestioningly, even gleefully parrot its calumnies, most prominent among which is the claim that the American criminal justice system is irredeemably racist and must be torn out root and branch in order to achieve some utopian vision of “social justice.”

It is important to note that the appending of any modifier to the word “justice” inverts, even perverts, its very meaning, and in no arena has actual justice been more perverted than in “social justice,” which at it core subordinates the interests of crime victims and the law-abiding to those of the criminals who prey upon them, revealing the enduring truth in the Old Testament wisdom that those who are kind to the cruel will be cruel to the kind. How else to explain the unhinged reaction among American elites to the April 21 police shooting of Ma’Khia Bryant in Columbus, Ohio?

Police body camera footage clearly showed Bryant, 16, was armed with a knife and in the very act of trying to stab a girl at the time she was shot. Of course we are saddened by the sight of someone being killed, most especially someone so young, but how depraved must one be to sympathize more with Bryant than with the girl she was attacking? Yet we heard voices from across the American left, from politicians to media figures to professional athletes, denouncing the officer and calling for his arrest. Had that officer not arrived and acted when and as he did, the city of Columbus and the country overall most likely would have recorded another instance of a young black person dying at the hands of another, the type of incident that happens thousands of times every year yet results in no protests, no outrage, and no indignant commentary in the newspapers or on television.

The silence among our elites to this carnage is deafening. Last year brought an alarming rise in homicides across the country, with killings up by an average of 37 percent in America’s 57 largest cities. Some cities were hit harder than others: in New York City the increase was 39 percent, in Chicago it was 55 percent, and in Milwaukee murders nearly doubled over the previous year. All told, there were 7,101 homicides in these 57 cities, the great majority of whose victims were blacks or Latinos who fell to killers of their own ethnicity.

The Washington Post reports 1,021 people in the United States were shot and killed by the police in 2020, and even if one accepts the phantasmagoric proposition that not a single one of these killings was justified, one is still left with problems so different in scale as to question the motives of those who focus on the smaller number and not the larger.

And yet that is what Black Lives Matter and their cult of followers do. Certainly an injustice was done to George Floyd, whose death has been addressed to the extent the legal system is able, but is his death more lamentable than those of the 81 other people murdered in Minneapolis last year? What of the 261 victims in St. Louis, the 437 in New York, and the 769 in Chicago? Were their lives so meanly regarded as to be insignificant to those who lecture their fellow citizens on the value of black lives?

They will not answer this question, and they will impugn the motives of anyone who dares put it forward, for to question them is obstruct the revolution they make no secret of advocating. BLM is merely the latest iteration of Marxist radicals to win the adulation of our political, academic, and media elites, the latest band of misfits to wield “Critical Theory” as a hammer and chisel (hammer and sickle?) against the pillars of Western civilization, among the foundational of which is the rule of law.

Chronicle of deaths foretold.

In his 2017 book The Devil’s Pleasure Palace, my friend Michael Walsh tells of the grim harvest brought by these purveyors of Critical Theory. “Look about your daily lives here in early twenty-first-century America and Western Europe,” he writes, “and see the shabbiness, hear the coarseness of speech and dialogue, witness the lowered standards not only of personal behavior but also of cultural norms, savor the shrunken horizons of the future.”

As it has in the past, America will one day repudiate the visions espoused by the neo-Marxists, but until it does, how many murdered corpses will litter our shrunken horizons?

When the Sheepdogs Become the Sheep

What happens to crime fighters when the cost of the fight is too high? What happens when politicians find it in their best interests to ignore real crime, i.e., shootings, robberies, burglaries, and the like, and instead focus on violations of what we might call the Pandemic Penal Code?

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has taken it upon itself to crack down on so-called “super-spreader parties” taking place around the county as young people seek ways to socialize while bars and restaurants are shut down due to Covid-19 regulations. The department has deployed what some may consider an inordinate amount of resources to combat these parties.

Why inordinate? Like most big-city departments in the country, the L.A. Sheriff’s Department saw a drastic rise in homicides during 2020, logging 199 for the year compared to 145 the previous year. (Note that these numbers do not include statistics for the city of Los Angeles, which had 343 homicides as of Dec. 26.) On the list of priorities for any law enforcement agency, one would expect to find reduction in homicides placed somewhere above eradication of underground parties.

Dangerous desperadoes.

And, while the Sheriff’s Department doesn’t ordinarily take enforcement action within the city limits of Los Angeles, where the LAPD has responsibility, deputies have repeatedly broken up parties in LAPD territory. Some might applaud this expenditure of resources as valuable in the fight against Covid but, again, shouldn’t it be a question of priorities?

If the Sheriff’s Department is so keen on attacking problems within the jurisdiction of the LAPD, perhaps they should devote some of those party-hunters to the LAPD’s Southeast Division, which covers Watts and the surrounding areas of South L.A., and where the number of shooting victims is up 3,700 percent during the most recent four-week reporting period compared to the same period a year ago.

I single out the L.A. Sheriff’s Department only because I live in the Los Angeles media market, where anyone who watches the local news can’t help but be aware of stories like this one and this one, with scenes of docile party-goers herded about like so many sheep to the shearers.

Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department officials continued to crack down on coronavirus “super-spreader” events and underground parties over the weekend as COVID-19 cases soar, the agency announced Sunday.

The operation by the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department’s Super-Spreader Task Force busted an underground event at 600 Block of West Manchester Avenue in South L.A. Saturday night and approximately 167 adults were cited for violating county health orders and released, sheriff’s officials said.

Another 50 people received warnings and were advised about the order, as well as COVID-19 health and safety measures, the agency said. Videos released by the agency Sunday showed dozens of masked people lined up against a wall outside a commercial building as officers escorted dozens more out of a building. Authorities did not elaborate on the event or whether any of the people they cited were arrested.

But the misplaced priorities are hardly unique to Los Angeles, or even to the United States. In Chicago, for example, where shootings and murders rose by 50 percent in 2020, politicians find it easier to enforce Covid-19 restrictions on otherwise law abiding people than to crack down on those responsible for all the violence. And in London, England, where crime has been rising steadily for five years, the Metropolitan Police recently mustered a large number of officers, a police dog, and a helicopter to raid a party being held in what they described as a “flagrant breach of Covid regulations.”

But perhaps nowhere have the police been as zealous in enforcing Covid restrictions as in Australia, where, according to Human Rights Watch, a pregnant woman was charged with “incitement” and arrested in front of her children for organizing an anti-lockdown protest on Facebook, another pregnant woman was forbidden from resting on a park bench during her government-allowed hour of outdoor exercise, and a woman with cerebral palsy was prevented from resting while out for a walk with her 70-year-old mother.

One may laugh at these excesses and think such deprivations could never happen here, in the Land of the Free, but recall that in the early days of the lockdown in California we saw a surfer fined $1,000 for daring to enter the water on an otherwise empty beach, people ticketed for sitting in their cars watching the sunset, and,  in what may still be the most farcical display of all, a lone paddleboarder off the coast of Malibu chased down and arrested with the help of not just one but two patrol boats.

It was during that early lockdown period that I happened to drive from Malibu to downtown Los Angeles, a journey that opened my eyes to the misplaced priorities among some in local law enforcement. The drive took me past miles and miles of beaches under sheriff’s department guard against the possibility someone might set foot on the sand or dip his toes in the Pacific.

But when I arrived in downtown Los Angeles I found things much as they have been for years, with homeless encampments lining the streets, their denizens free to mill about and do as they please, which in most cases is to indulge their various addictions and to deposit their various excretions in whatever public space they happen to occupy when the urge strikes.

Some lives matter.

But you see, enforcing the law against homeless people is difficult, as the “unhoused community” have become something like pets among Los Angeles politicos, few if any of whom are burdened with these encampments near their own homes. Surfers, paddleboarders, sunset watchers? They have no political patrons and must be brought to heel, for the good of all, of course.

During the summer’s riots following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, when rioters in cities across the country were excused from following the Covid precautions expected of the rest of us, we witnessed the display of police officers “taking a knee” in demonstrations of solidarity with the protesters, with one Massachusetts police chief taking the self-abasement to a humiliating level when, at the urging of the crowd, he lay face down on the steps outside his police station.

No super-spreading here.

Such political gestures won a measure of cheap grace from the crowds but did little to abate the violence, as there was little overlap between the peaceful protesters and those who busied themselves looting and burning. Worse, the kneeling and groveling reflected the division in police departments between the cops on the front lines battling rioters, those who would sooner take a bullet than a knee, and those in administrative posts who find value in theatrical gestures.

Sadly, it is the kneelers who run most police departments, reflecting the politics of those in the municipal governments they serve. They can’t make the others kneel (though some tried), but they can dictate their enforcement efforts. When fighting real crime becomes politically risky, they can justify their positions by enforcing lockdowns and related restrictions on ordinary people who for nearly a year have been conditioned to submit.

When the last of the sheepdogs have been turned into sheep, expect the wolves to rejoice and act accordingly.

The Thin Blue Line is Under Attack

And now it’s Philadelphia, which joins Atlanta, Minneapolis, and Kenosha, Wisc. on the list of cities where routine police encounters have gone violently wrong, leading to days of rioting and chaos on the streets, all of which, we are endlessly assured by our sophisticated betters in the media, meets the ever more capacious definition of “mostly peaceful protests.”

On its face, the police shooting of Walter Wallace Jr. in Philadelphia should not be controversial. Police were called to Wallace’s home for a domestic disturbance, and when he defied orders to drop the knife he was holding and advanced on two police officers – who had already retreated from the sidewalk into the street – they opened fire, an outcome to be expected in a rational world. But this is not a rational world, and in no milieu is it less so than in the realm of police encounters with black men.

There has arisen in certain quarters the preposterous notion that someone facing arrest has the right to resist an officer’s efforts – even to the point of assaulting him with a deadly weapon – and still expect an injury-free apprehension. Wallace appears to have shared this notion, as do the people “protesting” his death. Even Joe Biden, proving he can be just as uninformed about police work as he has been about everything else for 47 years, thinks police officers can shoot an attacker in the leg and somehow expect to survive the encounter.

Old-fashioned detective work may soon be a lost art.

How long can this continue? How long can we ask police officers to venture into America’s inner cities and combat crime while placing upon them these unreasonable expectations? And finally, who wants to be a police officer at all under these circumstances?

Raymond Chandler, the creator of the fictional detective Philip Marlowe, said it best: 

But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it.

Whenever some heinous crime occurs, one that rises above the ordinary daily American mayhem to shock the nation’s conscience, we remain anxious and unsettled until an arrest is made, even if we have no direct connection to the victim. Last July, for example, who could help but be horrified by the video of Anthony Robinson being gunned down while walking hand-in-hand with his seven-year-old daughter on a Bronx street corner?

We take it on faith that the perpetrators of such crimes will be identified and arrested, and indeed we found some measure of comfort when, less than two weeks later, three men were arrested and charged with Robinson’s murder. But what if there came a time when we could not have that faith, a time when we had no choice but to resign ourselves to seeing this kind of savagery go unpunished?

That day is coming, and soon.

The Robinson shooting was captured on video, which quite naturally raised public expectations that the killers would be apprehended. The police would find the car shown in the video, it was assumed, then they would find the killers. Easy, right? Just like on television.

The reality was not so simple. Finding the killers required the practice of what soon may be a lost art: old-fashioned detective work. And detective work in its turn demands the mastery of a number of interrelated fields, including forensic science and video technology. But far more than technical knowledge, detective work requires talents much less easily conveyed in a classroom or a textbook.

The presence of DNA at a crime scene and video of the crime as it occurred are powerful evidence, certainly, but in the overall scheme of a criminal investigation they are all but useless until they can be woven into the fabric of the case by a skilled detective. And any criminal case, even one buttressed by the strongest forensic evidence, can collapse in the absence of someone adept at the most overlooked skill in police work: talking to people.

There might be a hundred witnesses to a murder, there might be video of the crime as it occurred, there might be every type of circumstantial evidence tying a given suspect to the crime, but to secure a conviction it all must be tied together by a detective who can walk into an interview room and elicit the truth from people who in many cases would prefer to keep it hidden.

And that same detective, after having assembled the case and secured a criminal filing, must then be able to take the witness stand and persuade a jury that the man seated over there in the defendant’s chair is guilty as charged.

Tough even without a gun.

But where do we find such detectives? They come from the ranks of street cops, of course, men and women who learn, while riding in a radio car or walking a foot beat, how to talk to the parties involved in crimes – victims, witnesses, and suspects – according to each the appropriate level of skepticism, which may approach but never reaches zero.

It has been my experience, after nearly 40 years in the trade, that the best cops, those who do most of the heavy lifting in any police department, would have found equal success in any other field they might have chosen, but they were drawn to police work not merely as a job or even a career, but rather as a vocation. Today that vocation is threatened by the corrosive politics of the Left, which would hold that the police are not a remedy to crime and disorder but rather the very cause of it.

The undermining of law enforcement has been a goal of the Left for decades, and the campaign has achieved varying levels of success over the years. But with the death of George Floyd last May, the assault on police legitimacy has accelerated beyond anything seen before. A February 2020 article at City Journal lamented what was already a police recruiting crisis, but that crisis has now grown even more dire. Worse than a lack of candidates applying for the job is the accelerated flight of tenured officers from some police departments. In Seattle, for example, the problem is finely drawn: more officers left the city’s police force in the first nine months of this year than did all of last year or in 2018.

Not coincidentally, as the number of police officers decreases, and as those who remain on the job grow more apprehensive about making arrests lest they find themselves fired or prosecuted should an incident go awry, crime has increased across the country. Violent crime has risen in New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, St. Louis, Baltimore, and most other cities you can name, including, yes, Philadelphia, where homicides are up 44 percent from the same time last year. Sadly, few people with the authority to do anything about it seem willing to speak honestly about the problem, as evidenced by Joe Biden's fatuous instruction that cops shoot attackers in the legs.

The world needs people like those Raymond Chandler described, but it may soon find them in short supply. Someday, when the carnage has not been abated by the legions of social workers now proposed, when the bloodshed has grown intolerable even to those who today ignore or rationalize it, people will once again look to the police to solve the problem. But when that day comes, the pool of accumulated wisdom that has been passed from generation to generation of street cops and detectives will have evaporated for lack of use. “Please,” some mayor will implore his police chief, “do something about the crime.”

And the chief will shrug his shoulders and say, “We don’t know how.”

When Science is the Servant of Politics

Last week I embarked on a piece about how some scientists were making science the servant of their political opinions. Servant is perhaps too kind and vague a term; a better one might be ventriloquist’s dummy. When I started writing it, my expectation was that I would be making this argument about a range of scientific topics. Only the first would be medical science.

But some doctors forced medical science into so many political contortions in that week’s news that I never really managed to get onto other scientific disciplines. The money quote from a statement of 1200 medical professionals connected with the University of Washington’s Division of Allergy and Infectious Diseases was as follows:

[W]e wanted to present a narrative that prioritizes opposition to racism as vital to the public health, including the epidemic response. We believe that the way forward is not to suppress protests in the name of public health but to respond to protesters demands in the name of public health, thereby addressing multiple public health crises.

And in the last seven days, this argument—that Black Lives Matter protests are uniquely aimed at improving public health, damaged as it is by racism-- has spread to Britain where large crowds turned out for BLM rallies accommodated by the police who were otherwise fining people for meeting in “crowds” of more than six—and to partisan politics in the U.S. where public health professionals were critical of the GOP for pushing ahead with plans for a Republican Convention while tamely hoping that BLM protesters will wear marks.

The public reaction to these medical self-contradictions has been stronger in Britain than in America, partly because the lockdown regulations have been more stringent and more toughly enforced (with police handing out thousands of fines) than in the U.S. Allowing some people to protest and (not incidentally) to indulge in violent rioting in a self-righteous frame of mind, but fining others for attending a parent’s funeral has created a lot of free-floating anger. And one side-effect is a rise in skepticism towards other claims of both medical scientists and their brethren in other disciplines.

Take the Covid-19 claims first.

Britain’s media and opposition have been strongly critical of the handling of the Covid-19 crisis by the Boris Johnson government, suggesting that Ministers had ignored the advice of its SAGE committee of scientists and demanding that the minutes of SAGE now be published. Well, the minutes have now been published, and they show that Ministers followed the advice of SAGE more or less to the letter. If mistakes were made, they were scientists’ mistakes more than ministerial ones (though Ministers have to take responsibility for them on the proper constitutional grounds that “advisors advise, ministers decide.”) Well and good.

One example of this advice was particularly spicy, however. ICI’s Professor Neil Ferguson earlier in the week suggested that the lockdown had been imposed one week too late with the possible result that as many as 20,000 people had died needlessly. But when the SAGE records were released, they showed that the committee, including Ferguson, had voted unanimously for the previous policy because a lockdown would guarantee a second spike of the disease in the Fall.

When that policy changed, it did so in response to Ferguson’s own computer projections showing that Covid-19 was likely to spread very quickly and overwhelm the National Health Service. And as Dan Hodges in the Daily Mail points out, at the time he had pronounced the timing of the lockdown imposition to be about right. Ferguson’s computer projections, however, have since been subjected to savage criticism by information scientists who claim that it is worse than useless. Ferguson himself has changed his informal guesstimates of the course of the virus more than once. Other groups of scientists specializing in the field of infectious diseases have reached very different conclusions. And it’s in the nature of science that they can’t all be right.

We should all admit our own ignorance in these matters, of course. My own judgment—based on previous pandemics but shared apparently by many epidemiologists—is that we won’t know the full destructiveness of Covid-19 for another year at least. Today’s news from Beijing that a serious new outbreak of the disease has occurred and all the local food markets have been closed warn us that some of the early apparent treatments may prove temporary All the scientists’ projections are interesting, and some may prove accurate. But it is the progress of the actual virus in the world that will tell us which ones are right and which wrong.

That’s a highly significant conclusion because some areas of science are highly speculative and others over-reliant on computer projections. That’s true in particular for climate science where almost all of the claims of climate “emergencies” and the need for “urgency” to “combat” them come to us from computer projections that we must now treat skeptically.

The Global Warming Policy Foundation exists to test forecasts against reality on the ground. The IPCC is usually at the soft end of climate alarmism but it has been part of the skeptic camp on the question of weather extremes and if they are caused by global warming. This last week the GWPF published a study by the phyicist Ralph Alexander: which reached the following conclusion:

If there is any trend at all in extreme weather, it’s downward rather than upward. Our most extreme weather, be it heat wave, drought, flood, hurricane or tornado, occurred many years ago, long before the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere began to climb at its present rate. The recent atmospheric heat waves in western Europe pale in comparison with the soaring temperatures of the 1930s, a period when three of the seven continents and 32 of the 50 US states set all-time high temperature records, which still stand today.

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Professor Alexander lays out the evidence for the good news. We can examine it. It happened in the real world not in a virtual reality of guesstimates piled on guesstimates. Nor in a world of utopian politics and well-intentioned authoritarianism.

We have to get back to doing that more of the time.

Why the Wuhan Flu Turned Violent

After a week of violent rioting -- aka, "largely peaceful protests" -- over the death of a man nobody had ever heard of a fortnight ago, the rationale behind the continuing home imprisonment of law-abiding citizens over the phantom menace of the Wuhan Flu no longer make any sense, if it ever did. Trading the economic and social health of nations indefinitely for a variant of the seasonal flu was always a bad bargain, but now that the doctors' scheme has been revealed as purely political, it's time to stop.

The great Covid-19 pandemic was always a #NursingHomeDisease. It disproportionately struck the elderly who also had underlying health problems (comorbidities) that were exacerbated by the opportunistic Chinese bug. Let the facts be submitted to a candid world:

The Most Important Coronavirus Statistic: 42% Of U.S. Deaths Are From 0.6% Of The Population

According to an analysis that Gregg Girvan and I [Avik Roy] conducted for the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, as of May 22, in the 43 states that currently report such figures, an astounding 42% of all COVID-19 deaths have taken place in nursing homes and assisted living facilities.

Let that sink in: 42% of all COVID-19 deaths are taking place in facilities that house 0.62% of the U.S. population.

And 42% could be an undercount. States like New York exclude from their nursing home death tallies those who die in a hospital, even if they were originally infected in a long-term care facility. Outside of New York, more than half of all deaths from COVID-19 are of residents in long-term care facilities.

This is astounding. The Forbes piece goes on to note that in Ohio, a full 70 percent of the deaths attributed to the virus occured in nursing homes and assisted-living facilities; in Minnesota, the figure is 81 percent. Most of the damage, however, has been in the New York City metropolitan area, with tentacles as far south as Virginia and reaching north up into New England.

Another way to cut the data is to look at nursing home and assisted living facility deaths as a share of the population that lives in those facilities. On that basis, three states stand out in the negative direction: New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Connecticut.

In Massachusetts and Connecticut, COVID deaths per 10,000 nursing home and assisted living facility residents were 703 and 827, respectively. In New Jersey, nearly 10 percent of all long-term care facility residents—954 in 10,000—have died from the novel coronavirus.

The tragedy is that it didn’t have to be this way. On March 17, as the pandemic was just beginning to accelerate, Stanford epidemiologist John Ioannidis warned that “even some so-called mild or common-cold-type coronaviruses have been known for decades [to] have case fatality rates as high as 8% when they infect people in nursing homes.” Ioannidis was ignored.

Instead, of course, states such as New York deliberately forced the disease-incubating nursing homes to accept Covid-19 patients, with results we now all can see. Combine this with the deliberate cruelty of restricting access to the dying, and you have a hell on earth that only a Democrat could have created.

The bogus excuse for the lockdowns, now strikingly apparent in retrospect, was that we didn't want hospitals overwhelmed with the millions of patients and half a million deaths in Britain alone that "experts" like Professor Pantsdown of the Imperial College in London had predicted.  Nor did we see the deaths linked to "climate change" and air pollution that Harvard experts were forced to walk back. No wonder Dr. Fauci barely shows his face any more.

In short, nearly everything they told us about the second coming of the Black Death turned out to be wrong. And for this, our betters ravaged the economies of the West, bullied the honest citizenry, and suspended the Bill of Rights -- and then when the riots came, excused them on the non-medical grounds that "racism" (a neologism in common usage only since about 1970) is a worse health threat than, well, Covid-19. [What follows is not a parody.]

Public Health Experts Say the Pandemic Is Exactly Why Protests Must Continue

There has been a lot of concern on how the protests over the past several days may produce a wave of coronavirus cases. This discussion is often framed as though the pandemic and protests in support of black lives are wholly separate issues, and tackling one requires neglecting the other. But some public health experts are pushing people to understand the deep connection between the two.

Facing a slew of media requests asking about how protests might be a risk for COVID-19 transmission, a group of infectious disease experts at the University of Washington, with input from other colleagues, drafted a collective response. In an open letter published Sunday, they write that “protests against systemic racism, which fosters the disproportionate burden of COVID-19 on Black communities and also perpetuates police violence, must be supported.”

This is pure neo-Marxist bunkum, of course, a collectivist bit of agitprop that might have come from the Soviet Union in the 1970s. Indeed, the hive mind behind this tripe argue that the protesters are actually performing a public service by their selfless willingness to act as guinea pigs who can test the limits of the unconstitutional lockdowns for the greater good.

The letter and the experts who signed it make a case for viewing the protests not primarily as something that could add to cases of coronavirus (though they might) but as a tool to promote public health in and of themselves. Protests address “the paramount public health problem of pervasive racism,” the letter notes. “We express solidarity and gratitude toward demonstrators who have already taken on enormous personal risk to advocate for their own health, the health of their communities, and the public health of the United States.”

The real reason, though, is propaganda, as this Slate story eventually gets around to admitting:

By Tuesday afternoon, more than 1,000 epidemiologists, doctors, social workers, medical students, and other health experts had signed the letter. The creators had to close a Google Sheet with signatures to the public after alt-right messages popped up, but they plan to publish a final list soon, says Rachel Bender Ignacio, an infectious disease specialist and one of the letter’s creators. The hopes for the letter are twofold. The first goal is to help public health workers formulate anti-racist responses to media questions about the health implications. The second is to generate press to address a general public that may be concerned about protests spreading the virus.

There is a linkage between the coronavirus hoax and the riots -- it's just not what they say it is. From the moment Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election, the Left has been determined to destroy not only the Trump presidency but also the very country that allowed such an enormity to occur. They -- the DNC, the big media, academe -- have thrown everything they have into the fight, and that they have now turned to outright violence in its late stages ought to tell you something, both about the "resistance's" history, and the future it has planned for you.