Month: May 2020

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When you watch Sunday news remember:

The fake news media in cahoots with national Democrats and Democrat talking points will attempt to blame President trump for the rioting, looting, arson, lawlessness, and the abject failure of local Democrat politicians to take control in their respective areas.

Related:

A reminder of the typical Democrat riot response from Mayor Frey in Minneapolis

Mayor Frey Gives Masks to Rioters But Says Opening Churches Would Be a ‘Public Health Disaster.’

Related:

Tucker Carlson: Our leaders have sided with the agents of chaos – we’re told crimes of the mob are our fault.

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Delusion as riot response

Matt Vespa:

“…Democratic Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, also a Democrat, have been outright disastrous in how they’ve handled the situation. They’ve allowed the city to be ruled by the mob. They’ve ceded parts of the city for them to destroy. It’s been a disaster. Frey even reminded the rioters about social distancing guidelines regarding the coronavirus. And Walz tried to blame white supremacists for being involved in the chaos, a claim that the MN Department of Public Safety could not confirm because it’s not true. Whether it be a pandemic or a riot, the liberal media and their Democratic allies will always find a way to pivot to blame something that they think can be linked back to President Trump or Republicans. In doing so, they create fake news. It’s an election year. Trump looks better than Joe Biden by the day—and these two Democratic clowns in Minnesota can’t get their act together to quell the mob. Yeah, I could see why Democrats would try and get this white supremacist lie going—but it’s still total garbage (via USA Today) [emphasis mine]:

Drifting out of the shadows in small groups, dressed in black, carrying shields and wearing knee pads, they head toward the front lines of the protest. Helmets and gas masks protect and obscure their faces, and they carry bottles of milk to counteract tear gas and pepper spray.

Most of them appear to be white. They carry no signs and don’t want to speak to reporters. Trailed by designated “medics” with red crosses taped to their clothes, these groups head straight for the front lines of the conflict.

[…]

The real hard-core guys, this is their job: They’re involved in this struggle,” said Adam Leggat, a former British Army counterterrorism officer who now works as a security consultant specializing in crowd management for the Densus Group. “They need protests on the street to give them cover to move in.”

[…]

“There are detractors. There are white supremacists. There are anarchists,”  Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan said Saturday afternoon.

However, a civil arrest list provided by the public information officer of the St. Paul Police Department shows 12 of the 18 people arrested from Thursday through 6 a.m. Saturday were from Minnesota. Five of them are from St. Paul, three are from Woodbury (part of the Twin Cities metropolitan area), two are from Minneapolis, one is from Mankato and one is from St. Louis Park. Four are from out of state and two did not have cities of residence listed.

[…]

Leggat, the security consultant, said intelligence reports from his colleagues indicate most of the hard-core protesters in Minneapolis are far-left or anarchists, and that far-right groups have not yet made a significant appearance. He said looting is typically done by locals – usually people with no criminal record who just get caught up in the moment.

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Science or cult-like belief?

William DiPuccio:

“…Skepticism is at the heart of the scientific method.  Question everything.  Test everything.  Scientific knowledge is established by evidence, not authority.  The method is sound, but the execution may be imperfect.  That’s why I have faith in the methods of science but not necessarily in scientists.

Experts in science have a store of credibility that can be maintained only by their performance.  I have a great deal of trust in the meteorologists at the National Weather Service because their forecasts are 80%–90% accurate (no weatherman jokes, please — I used to be one!).  But if most of their predictions began to fail, I would turn elsewhere for my weather forecasts.

So it comes as a surprise that so many in the public have expressed a growing trust in medical scientists, even after a series of spectacular failures.  According to a newly published survey by Pew Research, public confidence in medical scientists to act in the best interest of the public increased from 35% in 2019, with “a great deal of confidence before the outbreak,” to 43% in April 2020.

Granted, some of the public health failures surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic were the result of incomplete data, but many of them could have been avoided:

    • Experts wildly over-projected the number of deaths, relying, in part, on a computer model that was poorly coded and unvetted.
    • Experts locked down the entire country, ignoring differences in population density between rural areas and cities and vulnerability due to age and underlying conditions.
    • Experts ignored lessons from the 1918 pandemic, which showed that lockdowns result in more infections and deaths by preventing herd immunity (National Academy of Sciences).
    • Experts told us not to wear a mask, then told us that everyone must wear a mask, despite studies that suggest that cloth masks are ineffective.
    • Experts tell us the masks protect those around us, ignoring previous research that showed that masks are much more effective in protecting the wearer (Plos One Journal).
    • Experts told us we need to “flatten the curve” before we can open up society.  Now some are moving the goalpost, saying we should wait until vaccinations are administered.
    • Experts did little to communicate the inherent uncertainties of their projections and the advice they were dispensing, thus creating a false sense of public trust.

The public’s growth in confidence, following these failures, parallels the reaction of cult followers who, after a failed doomsday prediction, double down in their adherence to the cult and its leadership.  A rational response to failed predictions and bad advice would be to reject any new declarations, or at least approach them with skepticism.  But cult followers place their faith in authority rather than evidence, so their confidence is largely unshaken by contradictory data.

This newfound confidence in medical scientists correlates directly with political affiliation.  Among Republicans (and those leaning Republican), there was virtually no change in public trust, which stands at 31% this year (a 1% decrease from 2019).  But among Democrats (and those leaning Democrat), confidence rose from 37% in 2019, to 53% in 2020 — a 16% increase.  The difference in public confidence between the two parties amounts to 22 percentage points…”

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George Floyd: Another media rush to judgement?

Peter Barry Chowka:

“…Almost totally absent from the mainstream news Friday, as the violent insurrection in the wake of George Floyd’s death spread to cities nationwide, were the preliminary results of his autopsy. The report was part of the arrest warrant for Derek Michael Chauvin, the disgraced former Minneapolis police officer who was taken into custody on Friday afternoon and charged with the third-degree murder of Floyd while he was in police custody last Monday evening. The brief mention of the autopsy suggests that the case against Chauvin, and possibly his three colleagues assuming they too will eventually be charged, for being totally responsible for the death of Floyd may not be as cut and dried as previously thought.

The Washington Times headlined its story Friday afternoon “Asphyxiation not the cause of George Floyd’s death: Autopsy.” An examination of the official complaint (arrest warrant) for Chauvin includes this sentence from a paragraph about Floyd’s cause of death on page 3:

The combined effects of Mr. Floyd being restrained by police, his underlying health conditions and any potential intoxicants in his system likely contributed to his death.

The eight-minute cell phone video showing Chauvin with his knee on Floyd’s neck after the latter’s arrest for allegedly trying to pass a $20 counterfeit bill, has become one of the most viewed videos of a police action of all time. Reporters, analysts, and almost everyone else in the country from left, right, and center have immediately jumped to the conclusion that Chauvin is clearly guilty of the murder of Floyd. The full autopsy, when it is finally made public, may render that popular conclusion before the wheels of justice have had a chance to turn another rush to judgement – not unlike what happened in the cases of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Freddie Gray after additional evidence came to light in determining the responsibility for their deaths. “Guilty beyond a reasonable doubt,” after all, is a high standard to achieve in the American judicial system…”

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Daniel Horowitz

“…When thousands of rioters burn down private businesses and even violently attack a woman in a wheelchair in response to an abhorrent act committed by one police officer, it is clear that the George Floyd riots are not about justice, as shown by the viral footage of the Minneapolis riots and the attacks on L.A. police officers yesterday. But what exposes this so-called movement as nothing but a dangerous anarchist mob, more than when and how they act, is when they fail to protest and actually remain silent when even more black lives are at stake.

The act of the officer who placed his knee on George Floyd’s neck for several minutes after he was completely neutralized and couldn’t move is obviously indefensible. As with every criminal act that leads to murder, he should be punished to the fullest extent of the law.

But why is it we never heard on the news about the endless trend of cop ambushes and executions at the hands of violent criminals in recent months? Why do we never hear about the cases where cops engage in near-suicidal restraint to go the extra mile to defuse a situation? That is the balance of coverage and perspective we rarely see.

The reason we never see this balance is because the media doesn’t have an agenda for justice or prudent policing, but to spark a racial war. This is why we never saw rioting or media outrage after a Somali immigrant police officer in Minneapolis fatally shot Justine Damond, an Australian woman, in cold blood in 2017 after she approached his patrol car to report a suspected rape behind her house. The only reason the cop was tried and sentenced to 12.5 years for manslaughter was that this was an international incident and the Australian government raised an outcry over it.

This illuminates a broader point about the focus of outrage on senseless murders in general. Why is the outrage related to policing and crime only in one direction and only when the race of the people affected is oriented a certain way?

Consider the following: According to the Washington Post’s database on police shootings, 17 unarmed African-Americans were killed by police in 2018. Let’s just assume the unlikely assumption that all 17 were unjustified in the mold of the choking death of George Floyd. That accounts for just 0.002% of the 7,407 black homicide victims that year, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, the overwhelming majority of whom were killed by black criminals, not white criminals or police. In cases where the races of both the victim and offender were known, a staggering 88.9% of black homicide victims were murdered by black criminals.

This is a reoccurring epidemic every year and is made worse by the broad and indiscriminate war on cops and public safety. Even the fear of dying from coronavirus didn’t stop the murder and mayhem in America’s inner cities. If black lives actually mattered, as all lives do, where is the outrage?…”

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Doug Santo