George Will in the Washington Post.
GW is on target.
Smart people are often stupid
----------------------------------
An admirable intelligentsia, inoculated by education against fashions and fads, would make thoughtful distinctions arising from historically informed empathy. It would be society’s ballast against mob mentalities. Instead, much of America’s intelligentsia has become a mob.
Saturday, June 27, 2020
Friday, June 26, 2020
Sunday, June 21, 2020
Did Lockdowns really save 3 million COVID-19 deaths, as Flaxman et al. claim?
Here is Nic Lewis at judithcurry.com.
The moral of this story is that a lot of what you hear about COVID-19 from scientists may be wrong.
The paper is quite technical.
Here is the conclusion.
----------------------------------------------
First and foremost, the failure of Flaxman et al.’s model to consider other possible causes apart from NPI of the large reductions in COVID-19 transmission that have occurred makes it conclusions as to the overall effect of NPI unscientific and unsupportable. That is because the model is bound to find that NPI together account for the entire reduction in transmission that has evidently occurred.
Secondly, their finding that almost all the large reductions in transmission that the model infers occurred were due to lockdowns, with other interventions having almost no effect, has been shown to be unsupportable, for two reasons:
The moral of this story is that a lot of what you hear about COVID-19 from scientists may be wrong.
The paper is quite technical.
Here is the conclusion.
----------------------------------------------
First and foremost, the failure of Flaxman et al.’s model to consider other possible causes apart from NPI of the large reductions in COVID-19 transmission that have occurred makes it conclusions as to the overall effect of NPI unscientific and unsupportable. That is because the model is bound to find that NPI together account for the entire reduction in transmission that has evidently occurred.
Secondly, their finding that almost all the large reductions in transmission that the model infers occurred were due to lockdowns, with other interventions having almost no effect, has been shown to be unsupportable, for two reasons:
- the prior distribution that they used for the strength of NPI effects is hugely biased towards finding that most interventions had essentially zero effect on transmission, with almost the entire reduction being caused by just one or two NPI.
- the relative strength of different interventions inferred by the model is extremely sensitive to the assumptions made regarding the average delay from infection to death, and to a lesser extent to whether self isolation and social distancing are taken to exert their full strength immediately upon implementation or are phased in over a few days.
Thursday, June 18, 2020
What freedom of speech?
Jonathan Turley gets it right. Freedom of speech is a thing of the past in the United States.
------------------------------------
We have been writing about efforts to fire professors who have criticized the “Defund the Police” campaign or Black Lives Matter. Now, Charles Negy, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Central Florida, is under school investigation and has received police protection after he tweeted about what he views as “black privilege.” While countless professors have written about “white privilege,” Negy is looking at discipline or termination while police have been called to his house to protect his life. Negy is not the first professor to be put under police protection after voicing criticism of the protests or BLM. Once again, I am less interested in the merits of the underlying debate as the implications for free speech and academic freedom. As one of the large free speech blogs, we have long discussed efforts to pressure or fire academics for their exercise of free speech and academic freedom. Recently, however, these efforts have been joined by schools and fellow academics who seek to deter others from expressing opposing views.
Negy is facing outrage caused over his tweets in early June including a petition demanding his termination by more than 30,000 signatures. While classroom misconduct has been raised by some critics, most of the effort (and the focus of this posting) is on his statements on social media. That petition addresses Negy’s statements on social media as unacceptable and grounds for termination:
“We are calling on the University of Central Florida to dismiss psychology professor Charles Negy due to abhorrent racist comments he has made and continues to make on his personal Twitter account. In addition to racism, Negy has engaged in perverse transphobia and sexism on his account, which is just as reprehensible. While he has a right to free speech, he does not have a right to dehumanize students of color and other minority groups, which is a regular occurance [sic] in his classroom. By allowing him to continue in his position, UCF would simply be empowering another cog in the machine of systemic racism.”
As we have previously discussed (with an Oregon professor and a Rutgers professor), there remains an uncertain line in what language is protected for teachers in their private lives. There were also controversies at the University of California and Boston University, where there have been criticism of such a double standard, even in the face of criminal conduct. There were also such an incident at the University of London involving Bahar Mustafa as well as one involving a University of Pennsylvania professor. Some intolerant statements against students are deemed free speech while others are deemed hate speech or the basis for university action. There is a lack of consistency or uniformity in these actions which turn on the specific groups left aggrieved by out-of-school comments. There is also a tolerance of faculty and students tearing down fliers and stopping the speech of conservatives. Indeed, even faculty who assaulted pro-life advocates was supported by faculty and lionized for her activism.
Negy has faced protests at his home and on campus, according to news reports. He has explored the concept of “white shaming” as an academic, including a book entitled “White Shaming: Bullying Based on Prejudice, Virtue-signaling, and Ignorance.”
Negy’s work is highly controversial and his tweets have inflamed critics. In a now deleted tweet, he wrote “Black privilege is real: Besides affirm. action, special scholarships and other set asides, being shielded from legitimate criticism is a privilege. But as a group, they’re missing out on much needed feedback.”
He has also written, again on Twitter, “If Afr. Americans as a group, had the same behavioral profile as Asian Americans (on average, performing the best academically, having the highest income, committing the lowest crime, etc.), would we still be proclaiming ‘systematic racism’ exists?”
Again, the question is not the merits or tenor of such writings but the right of academics to express such viewpoints. There is little comparable protests when professors write inflammatory comments about white culture or white privilege. Indeed, I have supported academics who have been criticized for such statements. However, the silence of other academics in these countervailing cases is deafening.
Indeed, many faculty like those at Cornell are pledging to combat what they call “racism masquerading as informed commentary.” When done through their own right to free speech, this is perfectly appropriate. However, there are now a variety of cases where faculty are supporting efforts to force colleagues to retire or to fire colleagues for expressing opposing views.
UCF President Alexander Cartwright told students that the university is now investigating Negy, and that he and his Administration “are acutely aware of the offensive and hurtful Twitter posts that professor Charles Negy has shared on his personal page. These posts do not reflect the values of UCF, and I strongly condemn these racist and abhorrent posts.”
So again the question is how we handle such disputes while respecting core protections of free speech. Faculty at state schools have the added protections from government regulation of speech. However, even public school principals have faced content-based discipline for questioning the protests or BLM movement. It is the lack of a clear standard or consistent application as academics that is so troubling. The message of academics is that their positions can be lost if they express opposing views or dispute a rising orthodox position on these positions on campus.
Again, I often find statements from academics on both sides to be repugnant and inflammatory. However, I am admittedly “old school” when it comes to free speech, particularly on campus. I have been writing for years about the erosion of free speech values in our colleges and universities. I have never seen the level of fear and intimidation in speaking with faculty today. Most are afraid of being labeled racist if they utter a single objection to these measures or the targeting of unpopular colleagues. The result is a chilling effect on speech that is being actively encouraged by Administrators and faculty in investigating, censuring, and condemning faculty to express opposing views on current issues like “Defund The Police.”
When I first entered teaching 30 years ago, universities were viewed as places of passionate debate and pluralistic viewpoints. For years, we have seen ideological rigidity and intolerance supplant those values – a trend that is destroying the very intellectual freedom that gives life and meaning to our educational institutions. This is not about any individual academic or the merits of their speech. It is about all of us and when we will take a stand for the right of expression and academic freedoms — even of those with whom we vehemently disagree.
------------------------------------
We have been writing about efforts to fire professors who have criticized the “Defund the Police” campaign or Black Lives Matter. Now, Charles Negy, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Central Florida, is under school investigation and has received police protection after he tweeted about what he views as “black privilege.” While countless professors have written about “white privilege,” Negy is looking at discipline or termination while police have been called to his house to protect his life. Negy is not the first professor to be put under police protection after voicing criticism of the protests or BLM. Once again, I am less interested in the merits of the underlying debate as the implications for free speech and academic freedom. As one of the large free speech blogs, we have long discussed efforts to pressure or fire academics for their exercise of free speech and academic freedom. Recently, however, these efforts have been joined by schools and fellow academics who seek to deter others from expressing opposing views.
Negy is facing outrage caused over his tweets in early June including a petition demanding his termination by more than 30,000 signatures. While classroom misconduct has been raised by some critics, most of the effort (and the focus of this posting) is on his statements on social media. That petition addresses Negy’s statements on social media as unacceptable and grounds for termination:
“We are calling on the University of Central Florida to dismiss psychology professor Charles Negy due to abhorrent racist comments he has made and continues to make on his personal Twitter account. In addition to racism, Negy has engaged in perverse transphobia and sexism on his account, which is just as reprehensible. While he has a right to free speech, he does not have a right to dehumanize students of color and other minority groups, which is a regular occurance [sic] in his classroom. By allowing him to continue in his position, UCF would simply be empowering another cog in the machine of systemic racism.”
As we have previously discussed (with an Oregon professor and a Rutgers professor), there remains an uncertain line in what language is protected for teachers in their private lives. There were also controversies at the University of California and Boston University, where there have been criticism of such a double standard, even in the face of criminal conduct. There were also such an incident at the University of London involving Bahar Mustafa as well as one involving a University of Pennsylvania professor. Some intolerant statements against students are deemed free speech while others are deemed hate speech or the basis for university action. There is a lack of consistency or uniformity in these actions which turn on the specific groups left aggrieved by out-of-school comments. There is also a tolerance of faculty and students tearing down fliers and stopping the speech of conservatives. Indeed, even faculty who assaulted pro-life advocates was supported by faculty and lionized for her activism.
Negy has faced protests at his home and on campus, according to news reports. He has explored the concept of “white shaming” as an academic, including a book entitled “White Shaming: Bullying Based on Prejudice, Virtue-signaling, and Ignorance.”
Negy’s work is highly controversial and his tweets have inflamed critics. In a now deleted tweet, he wrote “Black privilege is real: Besides affirm. action, special scholarships and other set asides, being shielded from legitimate criticism is a privilege. But as a group, they’re missing out on much needed feedback.”
He has also written, again on Twitter, “If Afr. Americans as a group, had the same behavioral profile as Asian Americans (on average, performing the best academically, having the highest income, committing the lowest crime, etc.), would we still be proclaiming ‘systematic racism’ exists?”
Again, the question is not the merits or tenor of such writings but the right of academics to express such viewpoints. There is little comparable protests when professors write inflammatory comments about white culture or white privilege. Indeed, I have supported academics who have been criticized for such statements. However, the silence of other academics in these countervailing cases is deafening.
Indeed, many faculty like those at Cornell are pledging to combat what they call “racism masquerading as informed commentary.” When done through their own right to free speech, this is perfectly appropriate. However, there are now a variety of cases where faculty are supporting efforts to force colleagues to retire or to fire colleagues for expressing opposing views.
UCF President Alexander Cartwright told students that the university is now investigating Negy, and that he and his Administration “are acutely aware of the offensive and hurtful Twitter posts that professor Charles Negy has shared on his personal page. These posts do not reflect the values of UCF, and I strongly condemn these racist and abhorrent posts.”
So again the question is how we handle such disputes while respecting core protections of free speech. Faculty at state schools have the added protections from government regulation of speech. However, even public school principals have faced content-based discipline for questioning the protests or BLM movement. It is the lack of a clear standard or consistent application as academics that is so troubling. The message of academics is that their positions can be lost if they express opposing views or dispute a rising orthodox position on these positions on campus.
Again, I often find statements from academics on both sides to be repugnant and inflammatory. However, I am admittedly “old school” when it comes to free speech, particularly on campus. I have been writing for years about the erosion of free speech values in our colleges and universities. I have never seen the level of fear and intimidation in speaking with faculty today. Most are afraid of being labeled racist if they utter a single objection to these measures or the targeting of unpopular colleagues. The result is a chilling effect on speech that is being actively encouraged by Administrators and faculty in investigating, censuring, and condemning faculty to express opposing views on current issues like “Defund The Police.”
When I first entered teaching 30 years ago, universities were viewed as places of passionate debate and pluralistic viewpoints. For years, we have seen ideological rigidity and intolerance supplant those values – a trend that is destroying the very intellectual freedom that gives life and meaning to our educational institutions. This is not about any individual academic or the merits of their speech. It is about all of us and when we will take a stand for the right of expression and academic freedoms — even of those with whom we vehemently disagree.
Racism is terrible – Anti-Semitism, ho hum
Here is Jonathan Tobin at jewishworldreview.com.
JT is on target.
There is no credibility without objectivity and consistency.
----------------------------------------
In the weeks since the brutal and unjustified killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, America has been undergoing what The New York Times approvingly called a "reckoning" that marks a fundamental shift in attitudes about race.
But the onset of this surge of public soul-searching and consciousness-raising about race has brought with it a trend that is deeply troubling. The heightened sensitivity about racism has led not merely to an epidemic of insincere virtue signaling about racism. It's also brought about a flood of accusations against alleged offenders that have more to do with politics, and out-of-control illiberal and intolerant social-media mobs, than making the country a better place. The widespread "canceling" of people who are deemed racists is becoming a serious problem.
But the question is, if it's so easy to cancel someone for not going along with the prevailing orthodoxy about what constitutes racism, why does engaging in anti-Semitism not bring about the same moral opprobrium from the media and the cultural forces taking down people for dissenting from the Black Lives Matter catechism?
Examples abound of instances in which people's careers and lives are being ruined because of their refusal to bend the knee — literally or metaphorically — to a Black Lives Matter movement that is determined to condemn anyone who dissents from their ideology or even question it.
One involves Gordon Klein, a professor at UCLA's School of Management who was placed on leave and had his classes taken away from him after refusing to grant African-American students exemptions from taking final exams because of their collective state of mind after the death of Floyd. The university took that action after angry students accused him of racism and because he had paraphrased Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous statement about judging people by the content of their character, rather than the color of their skin. Klein, who had taught at the school for 39 years, was doxxed by the students (they made public his email and home addresses) and is now under police protection because of death threats.
He isn't alone.
Tiffany Riley, a Vermont school principal, was placed on administrative leave for a Facebook post that said that while she agreed that black lives matter, she didn't support coercive measures to advance that cause or the demonization of police.
Harald Uhlig, an economics professor at the University of Chicago, was fired from a consulting job at the Federal Reserve for saying that Black Lives Matter had "torpedoed itself" by aligning the movement with calls for defunding the police. A mob of outraged economists and journalists led by The New York Times' Paul Krugman wanted Uhlig's head on a spike for this offense. Though Uhlig had issued a groveling apology for his heresy, the Fed acceded to their demand, saying there was no room at the institution for "racism," even though the economist's statement could not credibly be described as such a thing.
There are many other examples of similar incidents of people being canceled over dubious accusations of racism. But what is also interesting about what's going on is that far more egregious examples of anti-Semitic hate aren't producing the same results.
One prominent example was that of popular comedian and television star Chelsea Handler, who approvingly posted a video of National of Islam hatemonger Louis Farrakhan on her Instagram page this past weekend.
Handler said a Farrakhan statement on racism from an old clip from "The Phil Donahue Show" was "powerful." Farrakhan is a purveyor of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and vituperation against Jews. But according to Handler, his comments about the evils of racism directed at blacks deserved to "stand alone."
When a commenter asked her if she would single for praise out some out-of-context statement of Adolf Hitler, she argued that Farrakhan's hate was different because "he is just responsible for his own promotion of anti-Semitic beliefs. They are very different."
In other words, anti-Semitism is just another opinion an otherwise laudable person might hold, not evidence of murderous hate.
In the current moral panic about racism, one might have expected a surge of anger directed towards Handler by her colleagues in the entertainment industry, in addition to announcements that indicated that both individuals and companies wouldn't work with her in the future. That didn't happen. Instead, several celebrities even more famous, such as Jennifer Anniston, Jennifer Garner and Michelle Pfeiffer, voiced support for Handler.
Handler's ability to survive this incident with her career intact shows that myths about Hollywood being controlled by the Jews are nonsense. It's also likely that most Jews in the entertainment industry are either so cowed by the Black Lives Matter movement that they wouldn't dare to act against her or actually agree that anti-Semitism shouldn't disqualify Farrakhan from being considered a respected voice.But the pass for anti-Semitism doesn't just exist in the arts.
In early 2019, newly elected Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) made a splash by engaging in anti-Semitic incitement against Jews and Israel with accusations about AIPAC buying congressional support for Israel with "the Benjamins," coupled with charges that supporters of the Jewish state were guilty of dual loyalty.
While many on both sides of the aisle condemned her remarks, when push came to shove, congressional Democrats refused to censor her. While at the same time Republicans were punishing Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) for remarks that seemed an endorsement of white nationalism, Omar was rewarded with a seat on the Foreign Affairs Committee, where she could pursue her vendetta against Israel and support for the anti-Semitic BDS movement.
More than that, she got a pass from the same cultural forces that are canceling dissenters from the BLM mantra by being treated as an honored celebrity. Nor has that changed, since during the past two weeks she has made the rounds of the Sunday-morning talk shows, where hosts like CNN's Jake Tapper fawn on her.
The practice of shaming, shunning and silencing those with unpopular or even offensive views is antithetical to democracy and the free exchange of ideas. That is especially true when it involves actions or statements that are not actually racist.
At the same time, it says something truly ominous about our society and culture that questioning the BLM movement — even while avowing that, of course, black lives matter — can destroy a career, while endorsing anti-Semites and even engaging in Jew-hatred is not considered a big deal. We already know that the consequences of giving anti-Semites a pass can lead to horror. Apparently, those who pose as the supposedly enlightened guardians of our culture have either forgotten that or no longer care about it.
JT is on target.
There is no credibility without objectivity and consistency.
----------------------------------------
In the weeks since the brutal and unjustified killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, America has been undergoing what The New York Times approvingly called a "reckoning" that marks a fundamental shift in attitudes about race.
But the onset of this surge of public soul-searching and consciousness-raising about race has brought with it a trend that is deeply troubling. The heightened sensitivity about racism has led not merely to an epidemic of insincere virtue signaling about racism. It's also brought about a flood of accusations against alleged offenders that have more to do with politics, and out-of-control illiberal and intolerant social-media mobs, than making the country a better place. The widespread "canceling" of people who are deemed racists is becoming a serious problem.
But the question is, if it's so easy to cancel someone for not going along with the prevailing orthodoxy about what constitutes racism, why does engaging in anti-Semitism not bring about the same moral opprobrium from the media and the cultural forces taking down people for dissenting from the Black Lives Matter catechism?
Examples abound of instances in which people's careers and lives are being ruined because of their refusal to bend the knee — literally or metaphorically — to a Black Lives Matter movement that is determined to condemn anyone who dissents from their ideology or even question it.
One involves Gordon Klein, a professor at UCLA's School of Management who was placed on leave and had his classes taken away from him after refusing to grant African-American students exemptions from taking final exams because of their collective state of mind after the death of Floyd. The university took that action after angry students accused him of racism and because he had paraphrased Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous statement about judging people by the content of their character, rather than the color of their skin. Klein, who had taught at the school for 39 years, was doxxed by the students (they made public his email and home addresses) and is now under police protection because of death threats.
He isn't alone.
Tiffany Riley, a Vermont school principal, was placed on administrative leave for a Facebook post that said that while she agreed that black lives matter, she didn't support coercive measures to advance that cause or the demonization of police.
Harald Uhlig, an economics professor at the University of Chicago, was fired from a consulting job at the Federal Reserve for saying that Black Lives Matter had "torpedoed itself" by aligning the movement with calls for defunding the police. A mob of outraged economists and journalists led by The New York Times' Paul Krugman wanted Uhlig's head on a spike for this offense. Though Uhlig had issued a groveling apology for his heresy, the Fed acceded to their demand, saying there was no room at the institution for "racism," even though the economist's statement could not credibly be described as such a thing.
There are many other examples of similar incidents of people being canceled over dubious accusations of racism. But what is also interesting about what's going on is that far more egregious examples of anti-Semitic hate aren't producing the same results.
One prominent example was that of popular comedian and television star Chelsea Handler, who approvingly posted a video of National of Islam hatemonger Louis Farrakhan on her Instagram page this past weekend.
Handler said a Farrakhan statement on racism from an old clip from "The Phil Donahue Show" was "powerful." Farrakhan is a purveyor of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and vituperation against Jews. But according to Handler, his comments about the evils of racism directed at blacks deserved to "stand alone."
When a commenter asked her if she would single for praise out some out-of-context statement of Adolf Hitler, she argued that Farrakhan's hate was different because "he is just responsible for his own promotion of anti-Semitic beliefs. They are very different."
In other words, anti-Semitism is just another opinion an otherwise laudable person might hold, not evidence of murderous hate.
In the current moral panic about racism, one might have expected a surge of anger directed towards Handler by her colleagues in the entertainment industry, in addition to announcements that indicated that both individuals and companies wouldn't work with her in the future. That didn't happen. Instead, several celebrities even more famous, such as Jennifer Anniston, Jennifer Garner and Michelle Pfeiffer, voiced support for Handler.
Handler's ability to survive this incident with her career intact shows that myths about Hollywood being controlled by the Jews are nonsense. It's also likely that most Jews in the entertainment industry are either so cowed by the Black Lives Matter movement that they wouldn't dare to act against her or actually agree that anti-Semitism shouldn't disqualify Farrakhan from being considered a respected voice.But the pass for anti-Semitism doesn't just exist in the arts.
In early 2019, newly elected Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) made a splash by engaging in anti-Semitic incitement against Jews and Israel with accusations about AIPAC buying congressional support for Israel with "the Benjamins," coupled with charges that supporters of the Jewish state were guilty of dual loyalty.
While many on both sides of the aisle condemned her remarks, when push came to shove, congressional Democrats refused to censor her. While at the same time Republicans were punishing Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) for remarks that seemed an endorsement of white nationalism, Omar was rewarded with a seat on the Foreign Affairs Committee, where she could pursue her vendetta against Israel and support for the anti-Semitic BDS movement.
More than that, she got a pass from the same cultural forces that are canceling dissenters from the BLM mantra by being treated as an honored celebrity. Nor has that changed, since during the past two weeks she has made the rounds of the Sunday-morning talk shows, where hosts like CNN's Jake Tapper fawn on her.
The practice of shaming, shunning and silencing those with unpopular or even offensive views is antithetical to democracy and the free exchange of ideas. That is especially true when it involves actions or statements that are not actually racist.
At the same time, it says something truly ominous about our society and culture that questioning the BLM movement — even while avowing that, of course, black lives matter — can destroy a career, while endorsing anti-Semites and even engaging in Jew-hatred is not considered a big deal. We already know that the consequences of giving anti-Semites a pass can lead to horror. Apparently, those who pose as the supposedly enlightened guardians of our culture have either forgotten that or no longer care about it.
How cultural revolutions die or not
Victor Davis Hanson provides perspective on the extremists behind some of the protests and rioting.
----------------------------------------
Unlike coups or political revolutions, cultural revolutions don’t just change governments or leaders. Instead, they try to redefine entire societies. Their leaders call them “holistic” and “systematic.”
Cultural revolutionaries attack the very referents of our daily lives. The Jacobins’ so-called Reign of Terror during the French Revolution slaughtered Christian clergy, renamed months, and created a new supreme being — Reason.
Muammar Kaddafi’s Green Book cult wiped out violins and forced Libyans to raise chickens in their apartments.
The current Black Lives Matter Revolution has “canceled” certain movies, television shows, and cartoons, toppled statues, tried to create new autonomous urban zones, and renamed streets and plazas. Some fanatics shave their heads. Others have shamed authorities into washing the feet of their fellow revolutionaries.
But inevitably cultural revolutions die out when they turn cannibalistic. Once the Red Guard started killing party hacks too close to Mao, it began to wane.
If toppling Confederate statues is required, what then about Nancy Pelosi’s own mayor father, who once as Baltimore’s mayor dedicated honorific statues to Confederate generals?
If racists understandably do not deserve their names on national shrines, what to do with the iconic liberal graduate program at Princeton, the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs? It was named for a president who did more to further segregation and racial prejudice than any chief executive of the 20th century.
Stanford and Yale, coveted brand names of the progressive professional classes, are named after people whom protestors now deem racists.
It is easier to target Fort Bragg, the iconic military base named after a Confederate general, racist, and military mediocrity than to see one’s MBA or Ph.D. lose its Yale luster, or to confess that a liberal presidential icon perpetuated racism.
Once a cultural revolution gets going, there can be no contextualization of the past, no allowance for human frailty, no consideration of weighing evil vs. good.
Eventually, the architects of cultural upheavals always make two miscalculations.
One, they presume that destroying things will never apply to themselves, given their loud virtue signaling.
Two, if they are fingered by the mob, they assume they can somehow use their clout and influence to win an exemption.
In other words, once cultural revolutions turn anarchic and eat their own, they lose support. When quiet sympathizers conclude that they too may be targeted, to survive they turn on their former icons.
We are seeing that now. Liberal sympathetic bystanders are wondering whether downtown arson and looting will go private and reach their suburban homes. Do they really want their marquee universities or the Washington or Jefferson monuments defaced or renamed? What happens when calling 911 gets a constant busy signal?
When a liberal mayor or black police chief or progressive governor or white leftist who diverges from the party line is targeted by the mob, then who really is safe?
Answer? No one. And so the cultural revolution sputters to irrelevance.
What deflated the MeToo movement was the high toll that the accusations took among the Hollywood and cultural elite. Suddenly, progressive celebrities began demanding evidence and insisting on presumed innocence when their careers were destroyed.
What burns out these cultural upheavals is that today’s revolutionary can be denounced as tomorrow’s sell-out. No leader wants to share Robespierre’s rendezvous with his own guillotine.
There is one caveat.
Sometimes cultural revolutions don’t die out — if they are hijacked by a thug or killer.
The National Socialist movement was an irrelevant nihilist mob of crazies until Adolf Hitler turned it into his personal genocidal cult. A murderous Stalin resuscitated the absurdities of Lenin’s failing Bolshevism.
The present madness will wane like a virus, as it eats its own and terrifies its sympathizers that they may be next — unless, of course, a would-be Napoleon uses a “whiff of grapeshot” and turns the mob into his personal cult.
The armed rapper Raz Simone, who some say lords over the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” in downtown Seattle, so far has neither the diabolic talent nor the resources to spread his anarchy.
Dissident generals may be misguided, but they remain patriots. So far, we have seen no Napoleon emerge to claim that he is only the man who can lead today’s urban revolutionaries to victory.
A final thought: cultural revolutions not only eventually die without cruel dictators, but they can spawn dramatic pushbacks.
Ronald Reagan was the answer to the radical Sixties. Revolutionaries are now sowing the wind, but they have little idea of the reactive whirlwind they may soon reap.
----------------------------------------
Unlike coups or political revolutions, cultural revolutions don’t just change governments or leaders. Instead, they try to redefine entire societies. Their leaders call them “holistic” and “systematic.”
Cultural revolutionaries attack the very referents of our daily lives. The Jacobins’ so-called Reign of Terror during the French Revolution slaughtered Christian clergy, renamed months, and created a new supreme being — Reason.
Muammar Kaddafi’s Green Book cult wiped out violins and forced Libyans to raise chickens in their apartments.
The current Black Lives Matter Revolution has “canceled” certain movies, television shows, and cartoons, toppled statues, tried to create new autonomous urban zones, and renamed streets and plazas. Some fanatics shave their heads. Others have shamed authorities into washing the feet of their fellow revolutionaries.
But inevitably cultural revolutions die out when they turn cannibalistic. Once the Red Guard started killing party hacks too close to Mao, it began to wane.
If toppling Confederate statues is required, what then about Nancy Pelosi’s own mayor father, who once as Baltimore’s mayor dedicated honorific statues to Confederate generals?
If racists understandably do not deserve their names on national shrines, what to do with the iconic liberal graduate program at Princeton, the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs? It was named for a president who did more to further segregation and racial prejudice than any chief executive of the 20th century.
Stanford and Yale, coveted brand names of the progressive professional classes, are named after people whom protestors now deem racists.
It is easier to target Fort Bragg, the iconic military base named after a Confederate general, racist, and military mediocrity than to see one’s MBA or Ph.D. lose its Yale luster, or to confess that a liberal presidential icon perpetuated racism.
Once a cultural revolution gets going, there can be no contextualization of the past, no allowance for human frailty, no consideration of weighing evil vs. good.
Eventually, the architects of cultural upheavals always make two miscalculations.
One, they presume that destroying things will never apply to themselves, given their loud virtue signaling.
Two, if they are fingered by the mob, they assume they can somehow use their clout and influence to win an exemption.
In other words, once cultural revolutions turn anarchic and eat their own, they lose support. When quiet sympathizers conclude that they too may be targeted, to survive they turn on their former icons.
We are seeing that now. Liberal sympathetic bystanders are wondering whether downtown arson and looting will go private and reach their suburban homes. Do they really want their marquee universities or the Washington or Jefferson monuments defaced or renamed? What happens when calling 911 gets a constant busy signal?
When a liberal mayor or black police chief or progressive governor or white leftist who diverges from the party line is targeted by the mob, then who really is safe?
Answer? No one. And so the cultural revolution sputters to irrelevance.
What deflated the MeToo movement was the high toll that the accusations took among the Hollywood and cultural elite. Suddenly, progressive celebrities began demanding evidence and insisting on presumed innocence when their careers were destroyed.
What burns out these cultural upheavals is that today’s revolutionary can be denounced as tomorrow’s sell-out. No leader wants to share Robespierre’s rendezvous with his own guillotine.
There is one caveat.
Sometimes cultural revolutions don’t die out — if they are hijacked by a thug or killer.
The National Socialist movement was an irrelevant nihilist mob of crazies until Adolf Hitler turned it into his personal genocidal cult. A murderous Stalin resuscitated the absurdities of Lenin’s failing Bolshevism.
The present madness will wane like a virus, as it eats its own and terrifies its sympathizers that they may be next — unless, of course, a would-be Napoleon uses a “whiff of grapeshot” and turns the mob into his personal cult.
The armed rapper Raz Simone, who some say lords over the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” in downtown Seattle, so far has neither the diabolic talent nor the resources to spread his anarchy.
Dissident generals may be misguided, but they remain patriots. So far, we have seen no Napoleon emerge to claim that he is only the man who can lead today’s urban revolutionaries to victory.
A final thought: cultural revolutions not only eventually die without cruel dictators, but they can spawn dramatic pushbacks.
Ronald Reagan was the answer to the radical Sixties. Revolutionaries are now sowing the wind, but they have little idea of the reactive whirlwind they may soon reap.
Wednesday, June 17, 2020
A number problem
From quantamagazine.org
---------------------------------------
Experienced mathematicians warn up-and-comers to stay away from the Collatz conjecture. It’s a siren song, they say: Fall under its trance and you may never do meaningful work again.The Collatz conjecture is quite possibly the simplest unsolved problem in mathematics — which is exactly what makes it so treacherously alluring.
“This is a really dangerous problem. People become obsessed with it and it really is impossible,” said Jeffrey Lagarias, a mathematician at the University of Michigan and an expert on the Collatz conjecture.
Earlier this year one of the top mathematicians in the world dared to confront the problem — and came away with one of the most significant results on the Collatz conjecture in decades.
On September 8, Terence Tao posted a proof showing that — at the very least — the Collatz conjecture is “almost” true for “almost” all numbers. While Tao’s result is not a full proof of the conjecture, it is a major advance on a problem that doesn’t give up its secrets easily.
“I wasn’t expecting to solve this problem completely,” said Tao, a mathematician at the University of California, Los Angeles. “But what I did was more than I expected.”
Lothar Collatz likely posed the eponymous conjecture in the 1930s. The problem sounds like a party trick. Pick a number, any number. If it’s odd, multiply it by 3 and add 1. If it’s even, divide it by 2. Now you have a new number. Apply the same rules to the new number. The conjecture is about what happens as you keep repeating the process.
Intuition might suggest that the number you start with affects the number you end up with. Maybe some numbers eventually spiral all the way down to 1. Maybe others go marching off to infinity.
But Collatz predicted that’s not the case. He conjectured that if you start with a positive whole number and run this process long enough, all starting values will lead to 1. And once you hit 1, the rules of the Collatz conjecture confine you to a loop: 1, 4, 2, 1, 4, 2, 1, on and on forever.
“You just need to know multiplying by 3 and dividing by 2 and you can start playing around with it right away. It’s very tempting to try,” said Marc Chamberland, a mathematician at Grinnell College who produced a popular YouTube video on the problem called “The Simplest Impossible Problem.”
But legitimate proofs are rare.
In the 1970s, mathematicians showed that almost all Collatz sequences — the list of numbers you get as you repeat the process — eventually reach a number that’s smaller than where you started — weak evidence, but evidence nonetheless, that almost all Collatz sequences incline toward 1. From 1994 until Tao’s result this year, Ivan Korec held the record for showing just how much smaller these numbers get. Other results have similarly picked at the problem without coming close to addressing the core concern.
“We really don’t understand the Collatz question well at all, so there hasn’t been much significant work on it,” said Kannan Soundararajan, a mathematician at Stanford University who has worked on the conjecture.
The futility of these efforts has led many mathematicians to conclude that the conjecture is simply beyond the reach of current understanding — and that they’re better off spending their research time elsewhere.
“Collatz is a notoriously difficult problem — so much so that mathematicians tend to preface every discussion of it with a warning not to waste time working on it,” said Joshua Cooper of the University of South Carolina in an email.
Lagarias first became intrigued by the conjecture as a student at least 40 years ago. For decades he has served as the unofficial curator of all things Collatz. He’s amassed a library of papers related to the problem, and in 2010 he published some of them as a book titled The Ultimate Challenge: The 3x + 1 Problem.
“Now I know lots more about the problem, and I’d say it’s still impossible,” Lagarias said.
Tao doesn’t normally spend time on impossible problems. In 2006 he won the Fields Medal, math’s highest honor, and he is widely regarded as one of the top mathematicians of his generation. He’s used to solving problems, not chasing pipe dreams.
“It’s actually an occupational hazard when you’re a mathematician,” he said. “You could get obsessed with these big famous problems that are way beyond anyone’s ability to touch, and you can waste a lot of time.”
But Tao doesn’t entirely resist the great temptations of his field. Every year, he tries his luck for a day or two on one of math’s famous unsolved problems. Over the years, he’s made a few attempts at solving the Collatz conjecture, to no avail.
Then this past August an anonymous reader left a comment on Tao’s blog. The commenter suggested trying to solve the Collatz conjecture for “almost all” numbers, rather than trying to solve it completely.
“I didn’t reply, but it did get me thinking about the problem again,” Tao said.
And what he realized was that the Collatz conjecture was similar, in a way, to the types of equations — called partial differential equations — that have featured in some of the most significant results of his career.
Partial differential equations, or PDEs, can be used to model many of the most fundamental physical processes in the universe, like the evolution of a fluid or the ripple of gravity through space-time. They arise in situations where the future position of a system — like the state of a pond five seconds after you’ve thrown a rock into it — depends on contributions from two or more factors, like the water’s viscosity and velocity.
Complicated PDEs wouldn’t seem to have much to do with a simple question about arithmetic like the Collatz conjecture.
But Tao realized there was something similar about them. With a PDE, you plug in some values, get other values out, and repeat the process — all to understand that future state of the system. For any given PDE, mathematicians want to know if some starting values eventually lead to infinite values as an output or whether an equation always yields finite values, regardless of the values you start with.
For Tao, this goal had the same flavor as investigating whether you always eventually get the same number (1) from the Collatz process no matter what number you feed in. As a result, he recognized that techniques for studying PDEs could apply to the Collatz conjecture.
One particularly useful technique involves a statistical way of studying the long-term behavior of a small number of starting values (like a small number of initial configurations of the water in a pond) and extrapolating from there to the long-term behavior of all possible starting configurations of the pond.
In the context of the Collatz conjecture, imagine starting with a large sample of numbers. Your goal is to study how these numbers behave when you apply the Collatz process. If close to 100% of the numbers in the sample end up either exactly at 1 or very close to 1, you might conclude that almost all numbers behave the same way.
But for the conclusion to be valid, you’d have to construct your sample very carefully. The challenge is akin to generating a sample of voters in a presidential poll. To extrapolate accurately from the poll to the population as a whole, you’d need to weight the sample with the correct proportion of Republicans and Democrats, women and men, and so on.
Numbers have their own “demographic” characteristics. There are odd and even numbers, of course, and numbers that are multiples of 3, and numbers that differ from each other in even subtler ways. When you construct a sample of numbers, you can weight it toward containing certain kinds of numbers and not others — and the better you choose your weights, the more accurately you’ll be able to draw conclusions about numbers as a whole.
Tao’s challenge was much harder than just figuring out how to create an initial sample of numbers with the proper weights. At each step in the Collatz process, the numbers you’re working with change. One obvious change is that almost all numbers in the sample get smaller.
Another, maybe less obvious change is that the numbers might start to clump together. For example, you could begin with a nice, uniform distribution like the numbers from 1 to 1 million. But five Collatz iterations later, the numbers are likely to be concentrated in a few small intervals on the number line. In other words, you may start out with a good sample, but five steps later it’s hopelessly skewed.
“Ordinarily one would expect the distribution after the iteration to be completely different from the one you started with,” said Tao in an email.
Tao’s key insight was figuring out how to choose a sample of numbers that largely retains its original weights throughout the Collatz process.
For example, Tao’s starting sample is weighted to contain no multiples of 3, since the Collatz process quickly weeds out multiples of 3 anyway. Some of the other weights Tao came up with are more complicated. He weights his starting sample toward numbers that have a remainder of 1 after being divided by 3, and away from numbers that have a remainder of 2 after being divided by 3.
The result is that the sample Tao starts with maintains its character even as the Collatz process proceeds.
“He found some way to continue this process further, so that after some number of steps you still know what’s going on,” Soundararajan said. “When I first saw the paper, I was very excited and thought that it was very striking.”
Tao used this weighting technique to prove that almost all Collatz starting values — 99% or more — eventually reach a value that is quite close to 1. This allowed him to draw conclusions along the lines of 99% of starting values greater than 1 quadrillion eventually reach a value below 200.
It is arguably the strongest result in the long history of the conjecture.
“It’s a great advance in our knowledge of what’s happening on this problem,” said Lagarias. “It’s certainly the best result in a very long time.”
Tao’s method is almost certainly incapable of getting all the way to a full proof of the Collatz conjecture. The reason is that his starting sample still skews a little after each step in the process. The skewing is minimal as long as the sample still contains many different values that are far from 1. But as the Collatz process continues and the numbers in the sample draw closer to 1, the small skewing effect becomes more and more pronounced — the same way that a slight miscalculation in a poll doesn’t matter much when the sample size is large but has an outsize effect when the sample size is small.
Any proof of the full conjecture would likely depend on a different approach. As a result, Tao’s work is both a triumph and a warning to the Collatz curious: Just when you think you might have cornered the problem, it slips away.
“You can get as close as you want to the Collatz conjecture, but it’s still out of reach,” Tao said.
Tuesday, June 16, 2020
Coleman Hughes: The core premise of Black Lives Matter is false
Here is Coleman Hughs at jewishworldreview.com
CH provides a valuable perspective.
I think one reason for the continuing inability for Arabs and Jews to live together peacefully is that too many of both groups are unable to forget the past.
Justice should be for all. Justice does not include violence against person or property.
Those who misrepresent the issue are part of the problem, whether they do so purposely or due to ignorance.
------------------------------------
The brutal death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers has sparked protests and riots around the United States. We have witnessed humanity at its finest and at its ugliest.
Citizens of faraway nations have expressed solidarity with black Americans; police officers have marched alongside protesters; protesters have defended businesses against looting and destruction.
At the same time, rioters have burned down buildings and looted businesses; protesters have been pepper-sprayed and beaten; cops have been shot and run over with cars.
At the root of the unrest is the Black Lives Matter movement, which began with the acquittal of George Zimmerman in 2013 and rose to national prominence in the wake of Michael Brown's death in 2014. My view of BLM is mixed. On the one hand, I agree that police departments too often have tolerated and even enabled corruption. Rather than relying on impartial third parties, departments often decide whether to discipline their own officers; the legal doctrine of qualified immunity sets what many say is an unreasonably high bar for civilians bringing civil-rights lawsuits against police officers. Bodycams (which increase transparency, to the benefit of both wrongly treated police suspects and wrongly accused police) are not yet universal.
In the face of police unions that oppose even reasonable reforms, Black Lives Matter seems a force for positive change.
On the other hand, the basic premise of Black Lives Matter — that racist cops are killing unarmed black people — is false. There was a time when I believed it. I was one year younger than Trayvon Martin when he was killed in 2012, and like many black men, I felt like he could have been me. I was the same age as Michael Brown when he was killed in 2014, and like so many others, I shared the BLM hashtag on social media to express solidarity. By 2015, when the now-familiar list had grown to include Tamir Rice, Laquan McDonald, Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray, and Walter Scott, I began wearing a shirt with all their names on it. It became my favorite shirt.
It seemed plain to me that these were not just tragedies, but racist tragedies. Any suggestion to the contrary struck me as at best, ignorant, and at worst, bigoted.
My opinion has slowly changed. I still believe that racism exists and must be condemned in the strongest possible terms; I still believe that, on average, police officers are quicker to rough up a black or Hispanic suspect; and I still believe that police misconduct happens far too often and routinely goes unpunished. But I no longer believe that the cops disproportionately kill unarmed black Americans.
Two things changed my mind: stories and data.
First, the stories. Each story in this paragraph involves a police officer killing an unarmed white person. (To demonstrate how commonly this happens, I have taken all of them from a single year, 2015, chosen at random). Timothy Smith was killed by a police officer who mistakenly thought he was reaching into his waistband to grab a gun; the shooting was ruled justified. William Lemmon was killed after he allegedly failed to show his hands upon request; the shooting was ruled justified. Ryan Bolinger was shot dead by a cop who said he was moving strangely and walking toward her; the shooting was ruled justified. Derek Cruice was shot in the face after he opened the door for police officers serving a warrant for a drug arrest; the cops recovered marijuana from the property, and the shooting was ruled justified. Daniel Elrod robbed a dollar store, and, when confronted by police, allegedly failed to raise his hands upon request (though his widow, who witnessed the event, insists otherwise); he was shot dead. No criminal charges were filed. Ralph Willis was shot dead when officers mistakenly thought that he was reaching for a gun. David Cassick was shot twice in the back by a police officer while lying face down on the ground. Six-year-old Jeremy Mardis was killed by a police officer while sitting in the passenger seat of a car; the officer's intended target was Jeremy's father, who was sitting in the driver's seat with his hands raised out the window. Autumn Steele was shot dead when a police officer, startled by her German shepherd, immediately fired his weapon at the animal, catching her in the crossfire. Shortly after he killed her, bodycam footage revealed the officer's despair: "I'm f------ going to prison," he says. The officer was not disciplined.
For brevity's sake, I will stop here. But the list goes on.
For every black person killed by the police, there is at least one white person (usually many) killed in a similar way. The day before cops in Louisville barged into Breanna Taylor's home and killed her, cops barged into the home of a white man named Duncan Lemp, killed him, and wounded his girlfriend (who was sleeping beside him). Even George Floyd, whose death was particularly brutal, has a white counterpart: Tony Timpa. Timpa was killed in 2016 by a Dallas police officer who used his knee to pin Timpa to the ground (face down) for 13 minutes. In the video, you can hear Timpa whimpering and begging to be let go. After he lets out his final breaths, the officers begin cracking jokes about him. Criminal charges initially brought against them were later dropped.
At a gut level, it is hard for most people to feel the same level of outrage when the cops kill a white person. Perhaps that is as it should be. After all, for most of American history, it was white suffering that provoked more outrage. But I would submit that if this new "anti-racist" bias is justified — if we now have a moral obligation to care more about certain lives than others based on skin color, or based on racial-historical bloodguilt — then everything that I thought I knew about basic morality, and everything that the world's philosophical and religious traditions have been saying about common humanity, revenge, and forgiveness since antiquity, should be thrown out the window.
You might agree that the police kill plenty of unarmed white people, but object that they are more likely to kill unarmed black people, relative to their share of the population. That's where the data comes in. The objection is true as far as it goes; but it's also misleading. To demonstrate the existence of a racial bias, it's not enough to cite the fact that black people comprise 14 percent of the population but about 35 percent of unarmed Americans shot dead by police. (By that logic, you could prove that police shootings were extremely sexist by pointing out that men comprise 50 percent of the population but 93 percent of unarmed Americans shot by cops.)
Instead, you must do what all good social scientists do: control for confounding variables to isolate the effect that one variable has upon another (in this case, the effect of a suspect's race on a cop's decision to pull the trigger). At least four careful studies have done this — one by Harvard economist Roland Fryer, one by a group of public-health researchers, one by economist Sendhil Mullainathan, and one by David Johnson, et al. None of these studies has found a racial bias in deadly shootings. Of course, that hardly settles the issue for all time; as always, more research is needed. But given the studies already done, it seems unlikely that future work will uncover anything close to the amount of racial bias that BLM protesters in America and around the world believe exists.
All of which makes my view of Black Lives Matter complicated. If not for BLM, we probably would not be talking about ending qualified immunity, making bodycams universal, increasing police accountability, and so forth — at least not to the same extent. In fact, we might not even have a careful national database on police shootings. At the same time, the core premise of the movement is false. And if not for the dissemination of this falsehood, social relations between blacks and whites would be less tense, trust in police would be higher, and businesses all across America might have been spared the looting and destruction that we have seen in recent weeks.
But isn't this the price of progress? Isn't there a long tradition of using violence to throw off the shackles of white supremacy, going back to the Haitian revolution and the American Civil War? Didn't the urban riots of the late 1960s wake Americans up to the fact that racism did not end with the Civil Rights Act of 1965?
To start, any analogy to slave rebellions or justified revolutions can be dismissed immediately. Taking up arms directly against those enslaving you is one thing. Looting clothing stores or destroying grocery stores is something else entirely. We must be careful not to confuse the protesters with the rioters. The former are committed to nonviolence. The latter are simply criminals and should be treated as such.
As for the riots of the late 1960s, progressives should not praise them for shocking Americans into action without also noting that they helped elect Richard Nixon president, which progressives certainly did not intend; that they directly decreased the wealth of inner-city black homeowners; and that they scared capital away from inner cities for decades, worsening the very conditions of poverty and unemployment that the rioters were supposedly protesting.
What's more, the case for violence rests on the false notion that without it, little progress can be made. Recent history tells a different story. In 2018, the NYPD killed five people, down from 93 people in 1971. Since 2001, the national incarceration rate for black men ages 18-29 has gone down by more than half. Put simply, we know progress through normal democratic means is possible because we have already done it.
In a perfect world, I would like to see the yearly number of unarmed Americans killed by police decrease from 55 (the number in 2019) to zero. But the more I think about how we would achieve this, the less optimistic I am. At a glance, copying the policies of nations with very few police shootings seems like a promising path. But on closer inspection, one realizes how uniquely challenging the American situation is.
First, America is a huge country — the third largest in the world by population. That means that extremely low-probability events (such as police shootings) will happen much more frequently here than they do elsewhere. For instance, if America were the size of Canada, but otherwise identical, about six unarmed people would have been killed by police last year, not 55.
Second, America is a gun country, which makes policing in America fundamentally different than policing in other nations. When cops pull someone over in the United Kingdom, where the rate of gun ownership is less than one-twentieth the American rate, they have almost no reason to fear that the person they've stopped has a pistol hidden in the glove compartment. That's not true in America, where a cop gets shot just about every day. So long as we are a gun country, American police will always be liable to mistake a suspect's wallet or smartphone for a gun. And we will not be able to legislate that fact away — at least not completely.
A third factor (not unique to America) is that we live in the smartphone age. Which means that there are millions of cameras at the ready to ensure that the next police shooting goes viral. Overall, this is a good thing. It means that cops can no longer reliably get away with lying about their misbehavior to escape punishment. (And that the claims of those accusing police in such situations will face objective video scrutiny.) But it also means that our news feeds are perpetually filled with outlier events presented to us as if they were the norm. In other words, we could cut the rate of deadly shootings by 99 percent, but if the remaining 1 percent are filmed, then the public perception will be that shootings have remained steady. And it is the public perception, more than the underlying reality, that provokes riots.
Combine all three of these observations and one arrives at a grim conclusion: as long as we have a non-zero rate of deadly shootings (a virtual certainty), and as long as some shootings are filmed and go viral (also a virtual certainty), then we may live in perpetual fear of urban unrest for the foreseeable future.
The only way out of this conundrum, it seems to me, is for millions of Americans on the left to realize that deadly police shootings happen to blacks and whites alike. As long as a critical mass of people view this as a race issue, they will see every new video of a black person being killed as yet another injustice in a long chain dating back to the Middle Passage. That sentiment, when it is felt deeply and earnestly, will reliably produce large protests and destructive riots.
The political Right has a role to play as well. For too long, "All Lives Matter" has been a slogan used only as a clapback to Black Lives Matter. What it should have been, and still could be, is a true movement to reduce the number of Americans shot by the police on a race-neutral basis. If the challenge for the Left is to accept that the real problem with the police is not racism, the challenge for the Right is to accept that there are real problems with the police.
If the level of discourse among our public officials stays where it currently is — partisan and shallow — then there is not much hope. In a worst-case scenario, we may see a repeat of the George Floyd riots every few years. But if we can elevate the national discourse, if we can actually have that honest and uncomfortable conversation about race that people have been claiming to want for years, then we might have a chance.
CH provides a valuable perspective.
I think one reason for the continuing inability for Arabs and Jews to live together peacefully is that too many of both groups are unable to forget the past.
Justice should be for all. Justice does not include violence against person or property.
Those who misrepresent the issue are part of the problem, whether they do so purposely or due to ignorance.
------------------------------------
The brutal death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers has sparked protests and riots around the United States. We have witnessed humanity at its finest and at its ugliest.
Citizens of faraway nations have expressed solidarity with black Americans; police officers have marched alongside protesters; protesters have defended businesses against looting and destruction.
At the same time, rioters have burned down buildings and looted businesses; protesters have been pepper-sprayed and beaten; cops have been shot and run over with cars.
At the root of the unrest is the Black Lives Matter movement, which began with the acquittal of George Zimmerman in 2013 and rose to national prominence in the wake of Michael Brown's death in 2014. My view of BLM is mixed. On the one hand, I agree that police departments too often have tolerated and even enabled corruption. Rather than relying on impartial third parties, departments often decide whether to discipline their own officers; the legal doctrine of qualified immunity sets what many say is an unreasonably high bar for civilians bringing civil-rights lawsuits against police officers. Bodycams (which increase transparency, to the benefit of both wrongly treated police suspects and wrongly accused police) are not yet universal.
In the face of police unions that oppose even reasonable reforms, Black Lives Matter seems a force for positive change.
On the other hand, the basic premise of Black Lives Matter — that racist cops are killing unarmed black people — is false. There was a time when I believed it. I was one year younger than Trayvon Martin when he was killed in 2012, and like many black men, I felt like he could have been me. I was the same age as Michael Brown when he was killed in 2014, and like so many others, I shared the BLM hashtag on social media to express solidarity. By 2015, when the now-familiar list had grown to include Tamir Rice, Laquan McDonald, Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray, and Walter Scott, I began wearing a shirt with all their names on it. It became my favorite shirt.
It seemed plain to me that these were not just tragedies, but racist tragedies. Any suggestion to the contrary struck me as at best, ignorant, and at worst, bigoted.
My opinion has slowly changed. I still believe that racism exists and must be condemned in the strongest possible terms; I still believe that, on average, police officers are quicker to rough up a black or Hispanic suspect; and I still believe that police misconduct happens far too often and routinely goes unpunished. But I no longer believe that the cops disproportionately kill unarmed black Americans.
Two things changed my mind: stories and data.
First, the stories. Each story in this paragraph involves a police officer killing an unarmed white person. (To demonstrate how commonly this happens, I have taken all of them from a single year, 2015, chosen at random). Timothy Smith was killed by a police officer who mistakenly thought he was reaching into his waistband to grab a gun; the shooting was ruled justified. William Lemmon was killed after he allegedly failed to show his hands upon request; the shooting was ruled justified. Ryan Bolinger was shot dead by a cop who said he was moving strangely and walking toward her; the shooting was ruled justified. Derek Cruice was shot in the face after he opened the door for police officers serving a warrant for a drug arrest; the cops recovered marijuana from the property, and the shooting was ruled justified. Daniel Elrod robbed a dollar store, and, when confronted by police, allegedly failed to raise his hands upon request (though his widow, who witnessed the event, insists otherwise); he was shot dead. No criminal charges were filed. Ralph Willis was shot dead when officers mistakenly thought that he was reaching for a gun. David Cassick was shot twice in the back by a police officer while lying face down on the ground. Six-year-old Jeremy Mardis was killed by a police officer while sitting in the passenger seat of a car; the officer's intended target was Jeremy's father, who was sitting in the driver's seat with his hands raised out the window. Autumn Steele was shot dead when a police officer, startled by her German shepherd, immediately fired his weapon at the animal, catching her in the crossfire. Shortly after he killed her, bodycam footage revealed the officer's despair: "I'm f------ going to prison," he says. The officer was not disciplined.
For brevity's sake, I will stop here. But the list goes on.
For every black person killed by the police, there is at least one white person (usually many) killed in a similar way. The day before cops in Louisville barged into Breanna Taylor's home and killed her, cops barged into the home of a white man named Duncan Lemp, killed him, and wounded his girlfriend (who was sleeping beside him). Even George Floyd, whose death was particularly brutal, has a white counterpart: Tony Timpa. Timpa was killed in 2016 by a Dallas police officer who used his knee to pin Timpa to the ground (face down) for 13 minutes. In the video, you can hear Timpa whimpering and begging to be let go. After he lets out his final breaths, the officers begin cracking jokes about him. Criminal charges initially brought against them were later dropped.
At a gut level, it is hard for most people to feel the same level of outrage when the cops kill a white person. Perhaps that is as it should be. After all, for most of American history, it was white suffering that provoked more outrage. But I would submit that if this new "anti-racist" bias is justified — if we now have a moral obligation to care more about certain lives than others based on skin color, or based on racial-historical bloodguilt — then everything that I thought I knew about basic morality, and everything that the world's philosophical and religious traditions have been saying about common humanity, revenge, and forgiveness since antiquity, should be thrown out the window.
You might agree that the police kill plenty of unarmed white people, but object that they are more likely to kill unarmed black people, relative to their share of the population. That's where the data comes in. The objection is true as far as it goes; but it's also misleading. To demonstrate the existence of a racial bias, it's not enough to cite the fact that black people comprise 14 percent of the population but about 35 percent of unarmed Americans shot dead by police. (By that logic, you could prove that police shootings were extremely sexist by pointing out that men comprise 50 percent of the population but 93 percent of unarmed Americans shot by cops.)
Instead, you must do what all good social scientists do: control for confounding variables to isolate the effect that one variable has upon another (in this case, the effect of a suspect's race on a cop's decision to pull the trigger). At least four careful studies have done this — one by Harvard economist Roland Fryer, one by a group of public-health researchers, one by economist Sendhil Mullainathan, and one by David Johnson, et al. None of these studies has found a racial bias in deadly shootings. Of course, that hardly settles the issue for all time; as always, more research is needed. But given the studies already done, it seems unlikely that future work will uncover anything close to the amount of racial bias that BLM protesters in America and around the world believe exists.
All of which makes my view of Black Lives Matter complicated. If not for BLM, we probably would not be talking about ending qualified immunity, making bodycams universal, increasing police accountability, and so forth — at least not to the same extent. In fact, we might not even have a careful national database on police shootings. At the same time, the core premise of the movement is false. And if not for the dissemination of this falsehood, social relations between blacks and whites would be less tense, trust in police would be higher, and businesses all across America might have been spared the looting and destruction that we have seen in recent weeks.
But isn't this the price of progress? Isn't there a long tradition of using violence to throw off the shackles of white supremacy, going back to the Haitian revolution and the American Civil War? Didn't the urban riots of the late 1960s wake Americans up to the fact that racism did not end with the Civil Rights Act of 1965?
To start, any analogy to slave rebellions or justified revolutions can be dismissed immediately. Taking up arms directly against those enslaving you is one thing. Looting clothing stores or destroying grocery stores is something else entirely. We must be careful not to confuse the protesters with the rioters. The former are committed to nonviolence. The latter are simply criminals and should be treated as such.
As for the riots of the late 1960s, progressives should not praise them for shocking Americans into action without also noting that they helped elect Richard Nixon president, which progressives certainly did not intend; that they directly decreased the wealth of inner-city black homeowners; and that they scared capital away from inner cities for decades, worsening the very conditions of poverty and unemployment that the rioters were supposedly protesting.
What's more, the case for violence rests on the false notion that without it, little progress can be made. Recent history tells a different story. In 2018, the NYPD killed five people, down from 93 people in 1971. Since 2001, the national incarceration rate for black men ages 18-29 has gone down by more than half. Put simply, we know progress through normal democratic means is possible because we have already done it.
In a perfect world, I would like to see the yearly number of unarmed Americans killed by police decrease from 55 (the number in 2019) to zero. But the more I think about how we would achieve this, the less optimistic I am. At a glance, copying the policies of nations with very few police shootings seems like a promising path. But on closer inspection, one realizes how uniquely challenging the American situation is.
First, America is a huge country — the third largest in the world by population. That means that extremely low-probability events (such as police shootings) will happen much more frequently here than they do elsewhere. For instance, if America were the size of Canada, but otherwise identical, about six unarmed people would have been killed by police last year, not 55.
Second, America is a gun country, which makes policing in America fundamentally different than policing in other nations. When cops pull someone over in the United Kingdom, where the rate of gun ownership is less than one-twentieth the American rate, they have almost no reason to fear that the person they've stopped has a pistol hidden in the glove compartment. That's not true in America, where a cop gets shot just about every day. So long as we are a gun country, American police will always be liable to mistake a suspect's wallet or smartphone for a gun. And we will not be able to legislate that fact away — at least not completely.
A third factor (not unique to America) is that we live in the smartphone age. Which means that there are millions of cameras at the ready to ensure that the next police shooting goes viral. Overall, this is a good thing. It means that cops can no longer reliably get away with lying about their misbehavior to escape punishment. (And that the claims of those accusing police in such situations will face objective video scrutiny.) But it also means that our news feeds are perpetually filled with outlier events presented to us as if they were the norm. In other words, we could cut the rate of deadly shootings by 99 percent, but if the remaining 1 percent are filmed, then the public perception will be that shootings have remained steady. And it is the public perception, more than the underlying reality, that provokes riots.
Combine all three of these observations and one arrives at a grim conclusion: as long as we have a non-zero rate of deadly shootings (a virtual certainty), and as long as some shootings are filmed and go viral (also a virtual certainty), then we may live in perpetual fear of urban unrest for the foreseeable future.
The only way out of this conundrum, it seems to me, is for millions of Americans on the left to realize that deadly police shootings happen to blacks and whites alike. As long as a critical mass of people view this as a race issue, they will see every new video of a black person being killed as yet another injustice in a long chain dating back to the Middle Passage. That sentiment, when it is felt deeply and earnestly, will reliably produce large protests and destructive riots.
The political Right has a role to play as well. For too long, "All Lives Matter" has been a slogan used only as a clapback to Black Lives Matter. What it should have been, and still could be, is a true movement to reduce the number of Americans shot by the police on a race-neutral basis. If the challenge for the Left is to accept that the real problem with the police is not racism, the challenge for the Right is to accept that there are real problems with the police.
If the level of discourse among our public officials stays where it currently is — partisan and shallow — then there is not much hope. In a worst-case scenario, we may see a repeat of the George Floyd riots every few years. But if we can elevate the national discourse, if we can actually have that honest and uncomfortable conversation about race that people have been claiming to want for years, then we might have a chance.
Saturday, June 06, 2020
With the hiring of Lisa Page, NBC has crossed the Rubicon and left its objectivity scattered on the far bank
Jonathan Turley is on target. Most of the media cannot be trusted to tell a straight story.
-----------------------------------
Lisa Page, the former FBI lawyer who resigned in the midst of the Russian investigation scandal, has been hired a NBC and MSNBC as a legal analyst. The move continues a trend started by CNN in hiring Trump critics, including officials terminated for misconduct, to offer legal analysis on the Trump Administration. We have previously discussed the use by CNN of figures like Andrew McCabe to give legal analysis despite his being referred for possible criminal charges by the Inspector General for repeatedly lying to federal investigators. The media appears intent on fulfilling the narrative of President Trump that it is overly biased and hostile in its analysis. Indeed, it now appears a marketing plan that has subsumed the journalistic mission.
Page appeared with Rachel Maddow and began her work as the new legal analyst by discussing her own controversial work at the FBI. Page is still part of investigation by various committees and the investigation being conducted by U.S Attorney John Durham.
I have denounced President Trump for his repeated and often vicious references to Page’s affair with fired FBI Special Agent Peter Strzok. There is no excuse for such personal abuse.
However, Trump has legitimate reason to object (as he has) to this hiring as do those who expect analysis from experts without a personal stake in the ongoing investigations. It has long been an ethical rule in American journalism not to pay for interviews. Either NBC is paying for exclusive rights to Page in interviews like the one on Maddow’s show or it is hiring an expert with a personal stake in these controversies to give legal analysis. Neither is a good option for a network that represented the gold standard in journalism with figures like John Chancellor, Edwin Newman, and Roger Mudd.
It is not that Page disagrees with the Administration on legal matters or these cases. It is the fact that she is personally involved in the ongoing stories and has shown intense and at times unhinged bias against Trump in communications with Strzok and others. She is the news story, or at least a significant part of it.
Page was an unknown attorney in the FBI before she was forced into the public eye due to her emails with Strzok. Her emails fueled the controversy over bias in the FBI. They were undeniably biased and strident including the now famous reference to the FBI investigation as “insurance” in case Trump was elected. In the email in August 2016, here’s what Strzok wrote:
I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office [Andrew McCabe is the FBI deputy director and married to a Democratic Virginia State Senate candidate] for that there’s no way he gets elected—but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40 …
What particularly concerns me is that Page has come up recently in new disclosures in the Flynn case. In newly released document is an email from former FBI lawyer Lisa Page to former FBI special agent Peter Strzok, who played the leadership role in targeting Flynn. In the email, Page suggests that Flynn could be set up by making a passing reference to a federal law that criminalizes lies to federal investigators. She suggested to Strzok that “it would be an easy way to just casually slip that in.” So this effort was not about protecting national security or learning critical intelligence. As I have noted, the email reinforces other evidence that it was about bagging Flynn for the case in the legal version of a canned trophy hunt.
It appears that, on January 4, 2017, the FBI’s Washington Field Office issued a “Closing Communication” indicating that the bureau was terminating “CROSSFIRE RAZOR” — the newly disclosed codename for the investigation of Flynn. That is when Strzok intervened. The FBI had investigated Flynn and various databases and determined that “no derogatory information was identified in FBI holdings.” Due to this conclusion, the Washington Field Office concluded that Flynn “was no longer a viable candidate as part of the larger CROSSFIRE HURRICANE umbrella case.” On that same day, however, fired FBI Special Agent Peter Strzok instructed the FBI case manager handling CROSSFIRE RAZOR to keep the investigation open, telling him “Hey don’t close RAZOR.” The FBI official replied, “Okay.” Strzok then confirmed again, “Still open right? And you’re the case agent? Going to send you [REDACTED] for the file.” The FBI official confirmed: “I have not closed it … Still open.” Strzok responded “Rgr. I couldn’t raise [REDACTED] earlier. Pls keep it open for now.”
Strzok also texted Page: “Razor still open. :@ but serendipitously good, I guess. You want those chips and Oreos?” Page replied “Phew. But yeah that’s amazing that he is still open. Good, I guess.” Strzok replied “Yeah, our utter incompetence actually helps us. 20% of the time, I’m guessing :)”
Page will be the focus of much of the upcoming inquiries both in Congress and the Justice Department as will CNN’s legal analyst Andrew McCabe.
In her Maddow segment, Page attempts to defuse the “insurance policy” email as all part of her commitment to protecting the nation, not her repeatedly stated hatred for Trump. In what is now a signature for MSNBC, Maddow did not ask a single probative question but actually helped her frame the response. Even in echo journalistic circles, the echo between the two was deafening.
Page explained”
“It’s an analogy. First of all, it’s not my text, so I’m sort of interpreting what I believed he meant back three years ago, but we’re using an analogy. We’re talking about whether or not we should take certain investigative steps or not based on the likelihood that he’s going to be president or not.”
You have to keep in mind … if President Trump doesn’t become president, the national-security risk, if there is somebody in his campaign associated with Russia, plummets. You’re not so worried about what Russia’s doing vis-Ã -vis a member of his campaign if he’s not president because you’re not going to have access to classified information, you’re not going to have access to sources and methods in our national-security apparatus. So, the ‘insurance policy’ was an analogy. It’s like an insurance policy when you’re 40. You don’t expect to die when you’re 40, yet you still have an insurance policy.”
Maddow then decided to better frame the spin:
“So, don’t just hope that he’s not going to be elected and therefore not press forward with the investigation hoping, but rather press forward with the investigation just in case he does get in there.”
Page simply responds “Exactly.”
Well, not exactly. Page is leaving out that, as new documents show, there never was credible evidence of any Russian collusion. Recently, the Congress unsealed testimony from a long line of Obama officials who denied ever seeing such evidence, including some who publicly suggested that they had. Indeed, Page testified that even by May 2017, they did not find such evidence that “it still existed in the scope of possibility that there would be literally nothing” to connect Trump and Russia. There was little reason to believe in this “insurance policy” given the absence of evidence. Yet, Page still viewed the effort led by Strzok as an indemnity in case of election.
The Inspector General found that, soon after the first surveillance was ordered, FBI agents began to cast doubts on the veracity of the Steele document and suggested it might be disinformation from Russian intelligence. The IG said that, due to the relatively low standard required for a FISA application, he could not say that the original application was invalid but that it was quickly established that no credible evidence existed to support the continuance of the investigation — which Page called their “insurance policy.”
Page also left out her other emails including calling Trump foul names while praising Hillary Clinton and other opponents. Even if she were not involved in the ongoing controversy, her emails show her to be fervently opposed to both Trump and the Republicans.
Bias however has become the coin of the realm for some networks. Why have echo journalism when you can have an analyst simply repeat her position directly? For viewers who become irate at the appearance of opposing views (as vividly demonstrated in the recent apology of the New York Times for publishing a conservative opinion column), having a vehemently biased and personally invested analyst is reassuring. It is not like Page will suddenly blurt out a defense of Flynn or Trump or others in the Administration.
With Page, NBC has crossed the Rubicon and left its objectivity scattered on the far bank.
-----------------------------------
Lisa Page, the former FBI lawyer who resigned in the midst of the Russian investigation scandal, has been hired a NBC and MSNBC as a legal analyst. The move continues a trend started by CNN in hiring Trump critics, including officials terminated for misconduct, to offer legal analysis on the Trump Administration. We have previously discussed the use by CNN of figures like Andrew McCabe to give legal analysis despite his being referred for possible criminal charges by the Inspector General for repeatedly lying to federal investigators. The media appears intent on fulfilling the narrative of President Trump that it is overly biased and hostile in its analysis. Indeed, it now appears a marketing plan that has subsumed the journalistic mission.
Page appeared with Rachel Maddow and began her work as the new legal analyst by discussing her own controversial work at the FBI. Page is still part of investigation by various committees and the investigation being conducted by U.S Attorney John Durham.
I have denounced President Trump for his repeated and often vicious references to Page’s affair with fired FBI Special Agent Peter Strzok. There is no excuse for such personal abuse.
However, Trump has legitimate reason to object (as he has) to this hiring as do those who expect analysis from experts without a personal stake in the ongoing investigations. It has long been an ethical rule in American journalism not to pay for interviews. Either NBC is paying for exclusive rights to Page in interviews like the one on Maddow’s show or it is hiring an expert with a personal stake in these controversies to give legal analysis. Neither is a good option for a network that represented the gold standard in journalism with figures like John Chancellor, Edwin Newman, and Roger Mudd.
It is not that Page disagrees with the Administration on legal matters or these cases. It is the fact that she is personally involved in the ongoing stories and has shown intense and at times unhinged bias against Trump in communications with Strzok and others. She is the news story, or at least a significant part of it.
Page was an unknown attorney in the FBI before she was forced into the public eye due to her emails with Strzok. Her emails fueled the controversy over bias in the FBI. They were undeniably biased and strident including the now famous reference to the FBI investigation as “insurance” in case Trump was elected. In the email in August 2016, here’s what Strzok wrote:
I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office [Andrew McCabe is the FBI deputy director and married to a Democratic Virginia State Senate candidate] for that there’s no way he gets elected—but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40 …
It appears that, on January 4, 2017, the FBI’s Washington Field Office issued a “Closing Communication” indicating that the bureau was terminating “CROSSFIRE RAZOR” — the newly disclosed codename for the investigation of Flynn. That is when Strzok intervened. The FBI had investigated Flynn and various databases and determined that “no derogatory information was identified in FBI holdings.” Due to this conclusion, the Washington Field Office concluded that Flynn “was no longer a viable candidate as part of the larger CROSSFIRE HURRICANE umbrella case.” On that same day, however, fired FBI Special Agent Peter Strzok instructed the FBI case manager handling CROSSFIRE RAZOR to keep the investigation open, telling him “Hey don’t close RAZOR.” The FBI official replied, “Okay.” Strzok then confirmed again, “Still open right? And you’re the case agent? Going to send you [REDACTED] for the file.” The FBI official confirmed: “I have not closed it … Still open.” Strzok responded “Rgr. I couldn’t raise [REDACTED] earlier. Pls keep it open for now.”
Strzok also texted Page: “Razor still open. :@ but serendipitously good, I guess. You want those chips and Oreos?” Page replied “Phew. But yeah that’s amazing that he is still open. Good, I guess.” Strzok replied “Yeah, our utter incompetence actually helps us. 20% of the time, I’m guessing :)”
Page will be the focus of much of the upcoming inquiries both in Congress and the Justice Department as will CNN’s legal analyst Andrew McCabe.
In her Maddow segment, Page attempts to defuse the “insurance policy” email as all part of her commitment to protecting the nation, not her repeatedly stated hatred for Trump. In what is now a signature for MSNBC, Maddow did not ask a single probative question but actually helped her frame the response. Even in echo journalistic circles, the echo between the two was deafening.
Page explained”
“It’s an analogy. First of all, it’s not my text, so I’m sort of interpreting what I believed he meant back three years ago, but we’re using an analogy. We’re talking about whether or not we should take certain investigative steps or not based on the likelihood that he’s going to be president or not.”
You have to keep in mind … if President Trump doesn’t become president, the national-security risk, if there is somebody in his campaign associated with Russia, plummets. You’re not so worried about what Russia’s doing vis-Ã -vis a member of his campaign if he’s not president because you’re not going to have access to classified information, you’re not going to have access to sources and methods in our national-security apparatus. So, the ‘insurance policy’ was an analogy. It’s like an insurance policy when you’re 40. You don’t expect to die when you’re 40, yet you still have an insurance policy.”
Maddow then decided to better frame the spin:
“So, don’t just hope that he’s not going to be elected and therefore not press forward with the investigation hoping, but rather press forward with the investigation just in case he does get in there.”
Page simply responds “Exactly.”
Well, not exactly. Page is leaving out that, as new documents show, there never was credible evidence of any Russian collusion. Recently, the Congress unsealed testimony from a long line of Obama officials who denied ever seeing such evidence, including some who publicly suggested that they had. Indeed, Page testified that even by May 2017, they did not find such evidence that “it still existed in the scope of possibility that there would be literally nothing” to connect Trump and Russia. There was little reason to believe in this “insurance policy” given the absence of evidence. Yet, Page still viewed the effort led by Strzok as an indemnity in case of election.
The Inspector General found that, soon after the first surveillance was ordered, FBI agents began to cast doubts on the veracity of the Steele document and suggested it might be disinformation from Russian intelligence. The IG said that, due to the relatively low standard required for a FISA application, he could not say that the original application was invalid but that it was quickly established that no credible evidence existed to support the continuance of the investigation — which Page called their “insurance policy.”
Page also left out her other emails including calling Trump foul names while praising Hillary Clinton and other opponents. Even if she were not involved in the ongoing controversy, her emails show her to be fervently opposed to both Trump and the Republicans.
Bias however has become the coin of the realm for some networks. Why have echo journalism when you can have an analyst simply repeat her position directly? For viewers who become irate at the appearance of opposing views (as vividly demonstrated in the recent apology of the New York Times for publishing a conservative opinion column), having a vehemently biased and personally invested analyst is reassuring. It is not like Page will suddenly blurt out a defense of Flynn or Trump or others in the Administration.
With Page, NBC has crossed the Rubicon and left its objectivity scattered on the far bank.
Friday, June 05, 2020
Thursday, June 04, 2020
Where is Black Lives Matter when you need them?
Larry Elder at townhall.com.
LE is on target.
------------------------------------
Black lives matter. Black businesses, not so much.
Four Minneapolis cops were summarily fired, with one of the four arrested and charged with the murder of a black suspect named George Floyd, who died in police custody.
In cellphone video apparently taken by one of the many witnesses, a cop later identified as Derek Chauvin placed his knee on Floyd's neck for almost nine minutes as Floyd laid face-down and handcuffed on a city street. The cops ignored Floyd's repeated plea, "I can't breathe." By the time paramedics arrived, Floyd was unresponsive and apparently lifeless. After about an hour of attempted resuscitation by EMTs and emergency room staff, he was pronounced dead.
As of this writing, there have been eight consecutive days of protests in the streets of Minneapolis, with many businesses attacked, looted and set on fire. The local district attorney is continuing the investigation and may file additional charges against the officers. But this has not stopped the protests, many violent, that broke out in other cities across the country, including Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Atlanta.
Ostensibly, the protests are about the alleged "epidemic" of "widespread" and "race-based" police brutality against blacks and the lack of confidence, in the case of Floyd, that justice will be done. The problem with these assertions is that they are false, not supported by the data.
There is no "epidemic" of racist cops killing black suspects. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, police killings of blacks declined almost 80% from the late '60s through the 2010s, while police killings of whites have flatlined. Meanwhile, in 2017, according to the CDC's National Vital Statistics Reports, non-Hispanic blacks were eight times more likely to be a victim of a homicide (homicide death rate: 23.2 per 100,000) than non-Hispanic whites (homicide death rate: 2.9 per 100,000).
The No. 1 cause of preventable death for young white men is accidents, like car accidents and drownings. The No. 1 reason for death, preventable or otherwise for young black men, is homicide, almost always at the hands of another young black man. In 2018, there were approximately 7,400 black homicide victims, more than half of the nation's total number of homicides, out of a black population of 13%. Of that number, the police killed a little over 200 blacks, and nearly all of them had a weapon or violently resisted arrest.
In recent years, the police have averaged killing about 1,000 Americans per year. Of that number, half are white and one-quarter are black, with the race of remaining suspects of another race or unknown. Of the approximately 1,000 killed by cops, less than 4% involve a white officer and an unarmed black man.
Recent studies not only find no "systemic" abuse of black suspects by the cops, but if anything, cops are more hesitant, more reluctant, to use deadly force against a black suspect than against a white suspect. The Manhattan Institute's Heather MacDonald writes: "Regarding threats to blacks from the police: A police officer is 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer." Last year, according to the Washington Post, the police killed nine unarmed blacks. They killed 19 unarmed whites. In recent years, about 50 cops have been shot and killed annually in the line of duty. So, more cops are killed each year than are unarmed black suspects.
Minneapolis in 2020 is not Birmingham, Alabama, in the '50s. The top cop is not a racist segregationist like Birmingham's infamous Bull Connor, who sicced dogs and turned water hoses on civil rights protesters. The police chief of Minneapolis is Mexican-American and black. The mayor is a young Democratic liberal. The district's U.S. House representative is black. The vice president of the city council is black, as is the state attorney general.
In Baltimore, where in 2015, a black man named Freddie Gray died in police custody, how could one, with a straight face, argue that resident blacks suffer from "institutional" racism? The mayor was a black female; the top two officials in the police department were black; the city council was majority black; the state attorney who brought the charges against six officers was black; three of the six charged officers were black; the judge before whom two officers tried their cases was black; the U.S. attorney general was black, as was the president of the United States. Institutional racism?
Finally, why didn't President Barack Obama's administration deal with this alleged "systemic" or "structural" or "institutional" police brutality against blacks in his eight years in office? Meanwhile, over Memorial Day weekend in Obama's adopted hometown of Chicago, 10 people were killed, and 49 were shot. In a city where roughly one-third of the population is black, 70% of the city's homicide victims, according to the Chicago Police Department, are black.
When and where do the protests begin?
LE is on target.
------------------------------------
Black lives matter. Black businesses, not so much.
Four Minneapolis cops were summarily fired, with one of the four arrested and charged with the murder of a black suspect named George Floyd, who died in police custody.
In cellphone video apparently taken by one of the many witnesses, a cop later identified as Derek Chauvin placed his knee on Floyd's neck for almost nine minutes as Floyd laid face-down and handcuffed on a city street. The cops ignored Floyd's repeated plea, "I can't breathe." By the time paramedics arrived, Floyd was unresponsive and apparently lifeless. After about an hour of attempted resuscitation by EMTs and emergency room staff, he was pronounced dead.
As of this writing, there have been eight consecutive days of protests in the streets of Minneapolis, with many businesses attacked, looted and set on fire. The local district attorney is continuing the investigation and may file additional charges against the officers. But this has not stopped the protests, many violent, that broke out in other cities across the country, including Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Atlanta.
Ostensibly, the protests are about the alleged "epidemic" of "widespread" and "race-based" police brutality against blacks and the lack of confidence, in the case of Floyd, that justice will be done. The problem with these assertions is that they are false, not supported by the data.
There is no "epidemic" of racist cops killing black suspects. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, police killings of blacks declined almost 80% from the late '60s through the 2010s, while police killings of whites have flatlined. Meanwhile, in 2017, according to the CDC's National Vital Statistics Reports, non-Hispanic blacks were eight times more likely to be a victim of a homicide (homicide death rate: 23.2 per 100,000) than non-Hispanic whites (homicide death rate: 2.9 per 100,000).
The No. 1 cause of preventable death for young white men is accidents, like car accidents and drownings. The No. 1 reason for death, preventable or otherwise for young black men, is homicide, almost always at the hands of another young black man. In 2018, there were approximately 7,400 black homicide victims, more than half of the nation's total number of homicides, out of a black population of 13%. Of that number, the police killed a little over 200 blacks, and nearly all of them had a weapon or violently resisted arrest.
In recent years, the police have averaged killing about 1,000 Americans per year. Of that number, half are white and one-quarter are black, with the race of remaining suspects of another race or unknown. Of the approximately 1,000 killed by cops, less than 4% involve a white officer and an unarmed black man.
Recent studies not only find no "systemic" abuse of black suspects by the cops, but if anything, cops are more hesitant, more reluctant, to use deadly force against a black suspect than against a white suspect. The Manhattan Institute's Heather MacDonald writes: "Regarding threats to blacks from the police: A police officer is 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer." Last year, according to the Washington Post, the police killed nine unarmed blacks. They killed 19 unarmed whites. In recent years, about 50 cops have been shot and killed annually in the line of duty. So, more cops are killed each year than are unarmed black suspects.
Minneapolis in 2020 is not Birmingham, Alabama, in the '50s. The top cop is not a racist segregationist like Birmingham's infamous Bull Connor, who sicced dogs and turned water hoses on civil rights protesters. The police chief of Minneapolis is Mexican-American and black. The mayor is a young Democratic liberal. The district's U.S. House representative is black. The vice president of the city council is black, as is the state attorney general.
In Baltimore, where in 2015, a black man named Freddie Gray died in police custody, how could one, with a straight face, argue that resident blacks suffer from "institutional" racism? The mayor was a black female; the top two officials in the police department were black; the city council was majority black; the state attorney who brought the charges against six officers was black; three of the six charged officers were black; the judge before whom two officers tried their cases was black; the U.S. attorney general was black, as was the president of the United States. Institutional racism?
Finally, why didn't President Barack Obama's administration deal with this alleged "systemic" or "structural" or "institutional" police brutality against blacks in his eight years in office? Meanwhile, over Memorial Day weekend in Obama's adopted hometown of Chicago, 10 people were killed, and 49 were shot. In a city where roughly one-third of the population is black, 70% of the city's homicide victims, according to the Chicago Police Department, are black.
When and where do the protests begin?
Wednesday, June 03, 2020
Race and Riots
Here is John Stossel at townhall.com.
JS is on target.
People who can't tell the difference between the bad apples and the rest of the apples in a barrel are just as much a problem as the bad apples. They are responsible for things like racism.
Supposedly "good" apples who cover for bad apples are a problem, too.
All barrels have bad apples, including some members of all those self-righteous groups that consider themselves good apples.
----------------------------------------
"No justice, no peace!" they shout. Then they break windows.
It makes me furious.
But then I watch the video of the Minneapolis cop kneeling on George Floyd's neck, while Floyd repeatedly says, "I can't breathe," and three other officers just watch.
Then I see the video of the woman in Central Park calling 911, claiming, "An African-American man is threatening me!" But that was a racist lie.
Christian Cooper just asked her to leash her dog. We're supposed to leash our dogs in that section of Central Park.
But Amy Cooper didn't leash her dog. She frantically called 911, claiming she was under threat. She knew that by telling the police "an African American man is threatening me," she'd probably get a more aggressive response.
The left-wing New Yorker (she donated to Democratic campaigns) was careful to use that pointless, yet politically correct, term for black. Even though she's a racist.
Watching things like that should help me sympathize with the people rioting last night.
So should my friend Fabian's experience. When Fabian was 20, he bought his first car, a luxury edition Infiniti J30 Sedan. He'd saved up for it working as an airplane technician, transporting U.S. soldiers to war zones around the world.
Then, while pumping gas back in NYC, police officers approached him, demanding his license and registration.
He produced the documents and showed them that the car was registered in his name. But Fabian is black, and the police would not believe that the car belonged to him. They arrested him and charged him with grand theft auto.
He sat in jail for two days.
Finally, a judge dismissed the case -- using the same documentation Fabian had showed the police. They released him -- without any apology.
The trauma still haunts him. Fabian says it evokes a sense of helplessness -- a fear that "anytime there's an encounter with law enforcement, getting arrested or even death could be the outcome."
Yet, as I watch protesters (even two lawyers were arrested) throwing Molotov cocktails at police officers, and I see opportunistic young people looting stores, and my privileged left-wing white friends say things like, "the looting of our society by unrestrained capitalism is worse!" I get even more furious.
This country, and capitalism, has done more good things for disadvantaged people of ALL races than any society, ever.
Fabian, despite his terrible experience, says that living as a black man in America is a gift. He came here as a teen from Jamaica. America, he says, gave him opportunity he would never have had elsewhere.
Now, he's a capitalist who owns things. He smiles as he says he sees "a cultural black renaissance: promotion of black education, ownership, and acquiring assets as a top priority."
America, he says, is the land of opportunity.
Even if some cops are racist bullies.
JS is on target.
People who can't tell the difference between the bad apples and the rest of the apples in a barrel are just as much a problem as the bad apples. They are responsible for things like racism.
Supposedly "good" apples who cover for bad apples are a problem, too.
All barrels have bad apples, including some members of all those self-righteous groups that consider themselves good apples.
----------------------------------------
"No justice, no peace!" they shout. Then they break windows.
It makes me furious.
But then I watch the video of the Minneapolis cop kneeling on George Floyd's neck, while Floyd repeatedly says, "I can't breathe," and three other officers just watch.
Then I see the video of the woman in Central Park calling 911, claiming, "An African-American man is threatening me!" But that was a racist lie.
Christian Cooper just asked her to leash her dog. We're supposed to leash our dogs in that section of Central Park.
But Amy Cooper didn't leash her dog. She frantically called 911, claiming she was under threat. She knew that by telling the police "an African American man is threatening me," she'd probably get a more aggressive response.
The left-wing New Yorker (she donated to Democratic campaigns) was careful to use that pointless, yet politically correct, term for black. Even though she's a racist.
Watching things like that should help me sympathize with the people rioting last night.
So should my friend Fabian's experience. When Fabian was 20, he bought his first car, a luxury edition Infiniti J30 Sedan. He'd saved up for it working as an airplane technician, transporting U.S. soldiers to war zones around the world.
Then, while pumping gas back in NYC, police officers approached him, demanding his license and registration.
He produced the documents and showed them that the car was registered in his name. But Fabian is black, and the police would not believe that the car belonged to him. They arrested him and charged him with grand theft auto.
He sat in jail for two days.
Finally, a judge dismissed the case -- using the same documentation Fabian had showed the police. They released him -- without any apology.
The trauma still haunts him. Fabian says it evokes a sense of helplessness -- a fear that "anytime there's an encounter with law enforcement, getting arrested or even death could be the outcome."
Yet, as I watch protesters (even two lawyers were arrested) throwing Molotov cocktails at police officers, and I see opportunistic young people looting stores, and my privileged left-wing white friends say things like, "the looting of our society by unrestrained capitalism is worse!" I get even more furious.
This country, and capitalism, has done more good things for disadvantaged people of ALL races than any society, ever.
Fabian, despite his terrible experience, says that living as a black man in America is a gift. He came here as a teen from Jamaica. America, he says, gave him opportunity he would never have had elsewhere.
Now, he's a capitalist who owns things. He smiles as he says he sees "a cultural black renaissance: promotion of black education, ownership, and acquiring assets as a top priority."
America, he says, is the land of opportunity.
Even if some cops are racist bullies.
Are the Poor really poor?
Here is Walter Williams providing some perspective on the "Poor". Not what you hear from the media, politicians, and activists.
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Imagine that you are an unborn spirit in heaven. God condemns you to a life of poverty but will permit you to choose the country in which you will spend your life. Which country would you choose? I would choose the United States of America.
A recent study by Just Facts, an excellent source of factual information, shows that after accounting for income, charity and noncash welfare benefits such as subsidized health care, housing, food stamps and other assistance programs, “the poorest 20% of Americans consume more goods and services than the national averages for all people in the world’s most affluent countries.” This includes the majority of countries that are members of Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, including its European members. The Just Facts study concludes that if the U.S. “poor” were a nation, then it would be one of the world’s richest.
As early as 2010, 43% of all poor households owned their own homes. The average home owned by persons classified as poor by the Census Bureau is a three-bedroom house with one-and-a-half baths, a garage and a porch or patio. Eighty percent of poor households have air conditioning. The typical poor American has more living space than the average non-poor individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens and other cities throughout Europe. Ninety-seven percent of poor households have one or more color televisions — half of which are connected to cable, satellite or a streaming service. Some 82% of poor families have one or more smartphones. Eighty-nine percent own microwave ovens and more than a third have an automatic dishwasher. Most poor families have a car or truck and 43% own two or more vehicles.
Most surveys on U.S. poverty are deeply flawed because poor households greatly under report both their income and non-cash benefits such as health care benefits provided by Medicaid, free clinics and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, nourishment provided by food stamps, school lunches, school breakfasts, soup kitchens, food pantries, the Women, Infants & Children Program and homeless shelters.
We hear and read stories such as “Real Wage Growth Is Actually Falling” and “Since 2000 Wage Growth Has Barely Grown.” But we should not believe it. Ask yourself, “What is the total compensation that I receive from my employer?” If you included only your money wages, you would be off the mark anywhere between 30% and 38%. Total employee compensation includes mandated employer expenses such as Social Security and Medicare. Other employee benefits include retirement and health care benefits as well as life insurance, short-term and long-term disability insurance, vacation leave, tuition reimbursement and bonuses. There is incentive for people to want more of their compensation in a non-cash form simply because of the different tax treatment. The bottom line is that prior to the government shutdown of our economy in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, Americans were becoming richer and richer. The question before us now is how to get back on that path.
Speaking of the COVID-19 pandemic, Just Facts has a couple of interesting takes in an article by its co-founder James D. Agresti and Dr. Andrew Glen titled “Anxiety From Reactions to Covid-19 Will Destroy At Least Seven Times More Years of Life Than Can Be Saved by Lockdowns.”
Scientific surveys of U.S. residents have found that the mental health of about one-third to one-half of all adults has been substantially compromised by government reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic. There are deaths from non-psychological causes, such as government-mandated and personal decisions to delay medical care, which has postponed tumor removals, cancer screenings, heart surgeries and treatments for other ailments that could lead to early death if not addressed in a timely manner. Interesting and sadly enough, New York state enacted one of the strictest lockdowns in the U.S. but has 22 times the death rate of Florida, which had one of the mildest lockdowns.
As I pointed out in a recent column, intelligent decision-making requires one to not only pay attention to the benefits of an action but to its costs as well.
---------------------------------------
Imagine that you are an unborn spirit in heaven. God condemns you to a life of poverty but will permit you to choose the country in which you will spend your life. Which country would you choose? I would choose the United States of America.
A recent study by Just Facts, an excellent source of factual information, shows that after accounting for income, charity and noncash welfare benefits such as subsidized health care, housing, food stamps and other assistance programs, “the poorest 20% of Americans consume more goods and services than the national averages for all people in the world’s most affluent countries.” This includes the majority of countries that are members of Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, including its European members. The Just Facts study concludes that if the U.S. “poor” were a nation, then it would be one of the world’s richest.
As early as 2010, 43% of all poor households owned their own homes. The average home owned by persons classified as poor by the Census Bureau is a three-bedroom house with one-and-a-half baths, a garage and a porch or patio. Eighty percent of poor households have air conditioning. The typical poor American has more living space than the average non-poor individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens and other cities throughout Europe. Ninety-seven percent of poor households have one or more color televisions — half of which are connected to cable, satellite or a streaming service. Some 82% of poor families have one or more smartphones. Eighty-nine percent own microwave ovens and more than a third have an automatic dishwasher. Most poor families have a car or truck and 43% own two or more vehicles.
Most surveys on U.S. poverty are deeply flawed because poor households greatly under report both their income and non-cash benefits such as health care benefits provided by Medicaid, free clinics and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, nourishment provided by food stamps, school lunches, school breakfasts, soup kitchens, food pantries, the Women, Infants & Children Program and homeless shelters.
We hear and read stories such as “Real Wage Growth Is Actually Falling” and “Since 2000 Wage Growth Has Barely Grown.” But we should not believe it. Ask yourself, “What is the total compensation that I receive from my employer?” If you included only your money wages, you would be off the mark anywhere between 30% and 38%. Total employee compensation includes mandated employer expenses such as Social Security and Medicare. Other employee benefits include retirement and health care benefits as well as life insurance, short-term and long-term disability insurance, vacation leave, tuition reimbursement and bonuses. There is incentive for people to want more of their compensation in a non-cash form simply because of the different tax treatment. The bottom line is that prior to the government shutdown of our economy in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, Americans were becoming richer and richer. The question before us now is how to get back on that path.
Speaking of the COVID-19 pandemic, Just Facts has a couple of interesting takes in an article by its co-founder James D. Agresti and Dr. Andrew Glen titled “Anxiety From Reactions to Covid-19 Will Destroy At Least Seven Times More Years of Life Than Can Be Saved by Lockdowns.”
Scientific surveys of U.S. residents have found that the mental health of about one-third to one-half of all adults has been substantially compromised by government reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic. There are deaths from non-psychological causes, such as government-mandated and personal decisions to delay medical care, which has postponed tumor removals, cancer screenings, heart surgeries and treatments for other ailments that could lead to early death if not addressed in a timely manner. Interesting and sadly enough, New York state enacted one of the strictest lockdowns in the U.S. but has 22 times the death rate of Florida, which had one of the mildest lockdowns.
As I pointed out in a recent column, intelligent decision-making requires one to not only pay attention to the benefits of an action but to its costs as well.
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