Some thoughts on the relationship between civilization's fragility and the use of force

 It's important that I don'r frame this in some kind of boneheaded hot-take way. 

A quick conclusion would be easy to draw, and it wouldn't be entirely off the mark. 

But let's be thorough about this. If our ultimate goal is a society with more heart, a culture that's not myopic, we need to consider every aspect of this. 

I'm speaking of the role of guns in our assurance - as individuals, as families, as communities - that there is sufficient public order for us to feel basically safe. 

Four recent news items:

Sunday evening, at a large shopping mall in Greenwood, Indiana, a contiguous suburb on the south side of Indianapolis, a shooter armed with a rifle and many rounds of ammunition fired into the food court, killing three and wounding several others. He was then shot by a young man who was carrying a concealed handgun, which is perfectly legal under Indiana law. The awkward element in this scenario is that the mall has a clearly stated no-weapons policy. But what was mall management supposed to say in response to what transpired? The obvious had to bee acknowledged:

A spokesperson with the mall issued a statement Monday morning. In part of the statement, they said they were grateful for the “heroic actions of the Good Samaritan who stopped the suspect.”

We grieve for the victims of yesterday’s horrific tragedy in Greenwood. Violence has no place in this or any other community. We are grateful for the strong response of the first responders, including the heroic actions of the Good Samaritan who stopped the suspect.

In Minneapolis, Black Lives Matter got an earful from a woman who, along with her kids, had come under fire from a shooter who was taken down by police snipers:

Did police abuse their power? Black Lives Matter organizers think so and organized a demonstration outside of the apartment building yesterday. They got a counter-demonstration in response — from the woman whose children came under Sundberg’s fire:

What started as a rally for a man shot and killed by Minneapolis Police quickly took a turn after the mother of two nearly hit by bullets while inside her apartment showed up to share her story on Saturday afternoon.

Arabella Yarbrough was cooking food for her children Wednesday night when she says Tekle Sundberg fired bullets into their home, nearly hitting them. Police responded and helped Yarbrough escape when according to police, Sundberg also fired at officers. That led to a six-hour standoff outside the building that lasted until MPD snipers killed the 20-year-old early the next morning.

“I literally had five minutes to live while he had six hours to choose life or death. The police stated they did not want to kill him,” Yarbrough told Fox 9.

She confronted activists at a protest for Sundberg and against police violence on Saturday. A Fox 9 news crew was at the scene.

Yarborough took offense at the protest, and made sure everyone knew it. “This is not a George Floyd situation” she declared, telling protesters to go home. “This is not OK!”

Good question. Does BLM routinely protest intracommunity violence, or only law enforcement-related violence? I think we know the answer to that — and Yarbrough certainly knows it herself. That was an entirely rhetorical question.

And we know this by some of the responses Yarborough got that are clearly heard in this videos. Instead of acknowledging that Sundberg was a real and active threat to her and the other residents in the building, they scoffed at her protest. “You’re alive!” shouted one, while another shouted, “Shut up!” Yet another one scolded Yarbrough that “this is not the time or the place,” which is rather ironic considering the circumstances.

That last response - "this is not the time of place" - is particularly rich.

An investigators' report on the Uvalde, Texas school shooting reveals that 400 law enforcement officers, representing local, state and federal levels, were present at the scene:

Nearly 400 law enforcement officials rushed to mass shooting that left 21 people dead at a Uvalde elementary school but "systemic failures" created a chaotic scene that lasted more than an hour before the gunman was finally confronted and killed, according to a report from investigators released Sunday.

The nearly 80-page report, obtained by multiple media outlets, was the first to criticize both state and federal law enforcement, and not just local authorities in the Texas town for the bewildering inaction by heavily armed officers as a gunman fired inside a fourth-grade classroom .

The report — the most complete account yet of the hesitant and haphazard response to the May 24 massacre at at Robb Elementary School — was written by an investigative committee from the Texas House of Representatives and released to family members Sunday.

According to the Texas Tribune, which reviewed the report ahead of its scheduled release to the public later in the day, the overwhelming majority of responders at the school were federal and state law enforcement. That included nearly 150 U.S. Border Patrol agents and 91 state police officials, according to the Tribune.

Does the glaring point that a massive failure to establish security need to be elaborated on? It's screamingly obvious, is it not?

In Chicago, police morale has eroded to this point: 

The police have made arrests in just 12% of crimes reported last year, according to a Chicago Sun-Times analysis. That’s the lowest level since at least 2001, the first year the data was made publicly available.

The overall arrest rate peaked at nearly 31% in 2005 and has dropped steadily.

The decline in arrests mirrors a drop in nearly every category of police officers’ activity tracked by the Chicago Police Department. The numbers of traffic stops, tickets and investigative stops — in which pedestrians are patted down or searched by officers on the street — all have plummeted. The number of investigative stops dropped by more than half between 2019 and last year, falling from 155,000 citywide to 69,000.

And fewer crimes overall are getting reported — by victims and by the police, who used to produce many crime reports themselves while patrolling their beats.

The slowdown amounts to a pullback by police officers as the city has experienced its most violent years in decades, a rise also seen in other major U.S. cities during the coronavirus pandemic and in the wake of the 2020 death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer.

Rank-and-file police who patrol the streets and even top brass say officers are doing less.

Even just the suggestion that this was the case was once controversial. Former Mayor Rahm Emanuel caused a minor scandal in 2014 when he told a gathering of big city police chiefs and Justice Department officials that cops had “gone fetal” in response to growing public scrutiny.

John Catanzara, president of Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7, even says officers aren’t as active as they once were.

Contributing factors include:

• The pandemic.
• Dramatic shifts in strategy from the top.
• Increased scrutiny of the police.
• Cops saying they increasingly feel that making an arrest isn’t worth risking their lives, their jobs or becoming a viral news villain.

There also was a plunge in the number of arrests are for so-called index crimes, which include homicide, sexual assault, robbery and aggravated battery.

Officers made arrests in fewer than 6% of those crime categories that were reported last year, the lowest level since at least 2001, the Sun-Times analysis of Chicago police data found. The trend has continued this year, according to figures through early June.

For the early years covered by the data, arrest rates are higher for killings, shootings and sexual assaults because detectives have had more time to solve those cases.

Still, arrests typically are made in the month or year that a crime was committed, law enforcement officials say. The data analyzed by the Sun-Times doesn’t show when an arrest took place — whether it was in the year a crime was committed or later on.

Cops admit pulling back

In 2019, as the overall arrest rate continued to fall, City Hall agreed to a federal consent decree aimed at overhauling the police department following the killing by a police officer of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald in 2014 on the Southwest Side.

The department has since made reforms aimed at changing how officers do their jobs, including a stricter vehicle pursuit policy and a new foot pursuit policy.

Also, cops have been told to stop enforcing some low-level offenses, including the possession of small amounts of marijuana, which was legalized in Illinois as of the start of 2020.

But the number of arrests for possessing harder drugs, like heroin, also has fallen significantly. Those arrests peaked at 7,753 in 2001 but dropped last year to 929.

Current and former police officers — who agreed to speak on the condition they not be identified — say cops have been pulling back for other reasons.

A former commander says officers who regularly have had days off canceled are avoiding making some arrests because they don’t want to wind up in court during their time off.

A beat cop who patrols downtown says prosecutors’ high threshold for approving felony charges has made officers second-guess whether to engage “criminals with guns” — a sentiment the former commander echoes.

The beat cop says high-profile attacks on officers such as last August’s shooting in West Englewood that left Ella French dead and her partner Carlos Yanez critically wounded — “make us take a step back and think: Who really cares about us at that point?

“We can only support each other at the lowest ranks,” the officer says. “And if that means going out there and not doing anything, then that means going out there and not doing anything.”

Rank-and-file officers, sergeants and detectives also say they feel they have a target on their backs. They point to the consent decree, which requires the city to reform its policing policies after the Justice Department found officers engaged in civil rights violations.

Veteran cops say they used to go out of their way to make arrests when they saw suspicious activity but that they’re less likely to now for fear of getting into trouble and being fired or even arrested.

“In the past, I might see a guy with a gun in his waistband, and I’d jump out and chase him,” one decorated officer says. “No way I’d do that now.”

As I said at the outset, the obvious conclusion is that if we had more Elisjsha Dickens (the civilian at the Greenwood mall who took down the shooter there), we'd be safer, given the reality of the demoralized scaredy-cats we pay to protect us failing to do so. 

But is that really a tidy package in which we can wrap this all up and move on to other topics?

I suggest that we need to look at the acceleration of the whole cycle of phenomenon-and-backlash that characterizes pretty much everything in our society anymore. 

It's certainly been the case regarding gun rights, the defense of which in some quarters has turned into an ostentatious fetish.

And there's also the sociological reality that pretty much every case of either mass shootings in public spaces or gang warfare, with its all-too-frequent collateral casualties, has as a common element the rootlessness - often meaning fatherlessness - in which those inflicting death and injury have come of age.

A lot of people are dismissive of a causal connection between the products of popular culture - video games, music, movies - and the formation of rootless young men's characters and worldviews. Come on. Is it really possible that output so raw, so vulgar, so devoid of anything that seventy years ago was recognized as art, has no effect on those who steadily consume it?

Then there is also the growing achievement gap between females and males. As a society, we've emphasize the empowerment of women at the cost of considering how it affects the prospects of boys and men. Part of this process has involved focusing on what are customarily regarded as female priorities - feelings, seeing that everyone can feel good about himself or herself - as Christina Hoff Summers noted in her book that really got that conversation rolling, The War Against Boys.

And in recent years, yet another layer has been added to the situation, one which has the imprimatur of the US government: We have obliterated the inherent and divinely designed basic architecture of the universe.

To tie all this together, a lot of young males in our society have not signed onto that. Of course, neither have they become men, if we're going define that as a male person who understands what responsible stewardship of this powerful face that is his masculinity entails. We used to call those who did understand it gentlemen. 

Rather, these young males, in their starvation for basic appreciation, decide that they're gonna go out and gets guns and make a statement, by God. The the-world-won't-soon-forget-me mindset does not motivate them to contributions to society's betterment, but rather desperado last stands that serve as nothing but testaments to their nihilism.

I have no ready answers here. Of course, as a man of faith, however wobbly, I feel confident in recommending that path as the basis for a solution, but it's more challenging than it's ever been in America to point young men, or indeed anybody, to a church that will provide real guidance and support. 

I guess the way to conclude is to say that we ought to be very careful about coming to hard-and-fast conclusions about what to do. 

And we'd all better value our sanity and cultivate our maturity with vigilance. 

 

 

 

 

 

A couple of situations over which the nation erupted in chaos over incomplete information

 A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post at Precipice entitled "The Whole Truth."  A couple of instances have come along since then that reinforce the point I was making, namely, that

[w]hen we do know the whole picture, though, we’re not only remiss but deceptive if we don’t put all the facts on the table. 

One is some new information about George Floyd that I included, as a link, in my Thursday Roundup, immediately below this post, here at LITD. That information has to do with how the Hennepin County chief medical officer views the role of fentanyl and methamphetamine in Floyd's death. 

Yesterday, at Knowledge Is Good, former state and federal prosecutor George Parry filled in the timeline by which the prosecutors there became privy to the toxicology report showing that Floyd was OD-ing at the time of his run-in with police. Upshot: That document didn't come to light until after charges had been filed against Chauvin et al:

These charges were based on the autopsy performed by the Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s Office and a private “re-autopsy” performed at the request of the Floyd family’s attorney. Based on those procedures, the medical examiner issued a revised autopsy report stating that Floyd had died of “cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint and neck compression.” In short, Floyd’s death was allegedly caused by the manner in which the police had restrained him.

But the police defendants were charged before the medical examiner had received the report of Floyd’s toxicology screen by NMS Labs of Horsham, Pennsylvania.

Then, on May 31, 2020, NMS Labs forwarded Floyd’s toxicology report to the Hennepin County Medical Examiners’ Office.

And that’s when the proverbial fecal matter hit the fan.

At 7:30 p.m. on May 31, 2020, prosecutors “met” online with Dr. Andrew Baker, Chief Medical Examiner of Hennepin County, to discuss Floyd’s toxicology report. Take a look at this recently released June 1, 2020, memorandum by Assistant County Attorney Amy Sweasy of that discussion.

So there they were, staring at the just-received and damning toxicology report that blew to smithereens the whole prosecution theory that the police had killed Floyd. To their undoubted dismay, Dr. Baker, the chief medical examiner, had to concede that at 11 ng/mL, Floyd had “a fatal level of fentanyl under normal circumstances.” He also conceded that the fentanyl overdose “can cause pulmonary edema,” a frothy fluid build-up in the lungs that was evidenced by the finding at autopsy that Floyd’s lungs weighed two to three times normal weight.

This is consistent with Officer Kueng’s observation at the scene that Floyd was foaming at the mouth and, as found at autopsy, that his lungs were “diffusely congested and edematous.”

In other words, like a drowned man, Floyd’s lungs were filled with fluid. And that was the obvious and inescapable reason why Floyd kept shouting over and over again that he couldn’t breathe even when he was upright and mobile.

The memorandum ends with Dr. Baker’s devastating conclusion that “if Floyd had been found dead in his home (or anywhere else) and there were no other contributing factors he [Dr. Baker] would conclude that it was an overdose death.”

Translation: this toxicology report drives a stake through the heart of our murder case. How do we justify criminally charging these police officers and explain away our colossal screw-up?

It is quite telling that this explosively exculpatory June 1 memorandum was not released by the prosecution until August 25, 2020. All of which prompts these questions:

First, why did the prosecution wait three months to release this memorandum?

Second, if the prosecution had released this information in a timely fashion, would that have helped to quell the anti-police outrage that has fueled the nationwide orgy of rioting and looting?

Third, in light of Floyd’s toxicology results and the medical examiner’s assessment that Floyd’s fentanyl overdose caused him to essentially drown in his own bodily fluid, why haven’t the charges against all of the police defendants been dropped?

Think about it. This nation has been subjected to three months of its cities being torched and looted in response to an inaccurate narrative. 

And now, more details are emerging about the Jacob Blake situation:

the police dispatcher said a woman had called police saying “her boyfriend was present and was not supposed to be on the premises.” 

That certainly made it sound more like what I alluded to initially. If there was a warrant out for Blake for domestic abuse, sexual assault, etc. then it would make sense if a restraining order was in place. Now, most of these details are being confirmed. The New York Post reported last night that the woman in question was a repeat victim of Blake’s and she was the one who called the police to the scene after Blake pushed his way into her home and sexually assaulted her again. Before you click through and read the rest of that article, I will warn you in advance that the details of the assault are offered in a rather graphic form and may be disturbing to some readers.

The cops involved in the shooting of Jacob Blake — which touched off a fresh wave of angry, anti-police sentiment across the country — were attempting to arrest him for violating a restraining order stemming from an alleged sexual assault, The Post has learned.

Blake, 29, was forbidden from going to the Kenosha home of his alleged victim from the May 3 incident, and police were dispatched Sunday following a 911 call saying he was there.

The responding officers were aware he had an open warrant for felony sexual assault, according to dispatch records and the Kenosha Professional Police Association, which released a statement on the incident on Friday.

So this wasn’t some meeting of happenstance between Jason Blake and the police. They had been called to the scene by a repeat sexual assault victim. There was already a warrant out for Blake’s arrest and the cops were there to execute it. The cops knew about all of this before they arrived, explaining how they might have been prepared for a confrontation when they got there and their general approach in trying to take Blake into custody. Blake’s family is calling any discussion of his history prior to the shooting “garbage” but it certainly seems relevant. 

You should read the linked New York Post article to get fully elucidated.  This woman was damn scared of Jacob Blake.

It may be too much to ask in this overheated summer of 2020 that everyone insist on enough facts about these situations to preclude their coming to emotion-driven conclusions that have society-wide consequences. 

It doesn't take much - just a few of these situations that become the hot news of the hour without all relevant information on the table - for what remains of trust in post-America's news-reporting industry to fully evaporate. That void will be filled by common acceptance of the most inflammatory narrative out there, and the resultant anarchy will gain further momentum.

 

Barney & Clyde - Season 2, Episode 16

 It's here!

Pour yourself something bracing, pull up a stool and join us at the virtual libation station for an hour of examination of 

NOT QUITE A BUSINESS, NOT QUITE A GOVERNMENT AGENCY - The US Postal Service: the upcoming hearings on its current predicament, Trump’s bluster about its role in the upcoming elections, a bit about the service’s history (with a particular focus on Nixon making it quasi-autonomous in 1970), the role of the union, and its unfunded liabilities. 

I’LL DECIDE THAT FOR MYSELF, THANK YOU - Uber’s announcement that it will suspend operations if it’s forced to regard its drivers as employees.

TURNING DOWN THE TEMPERATURE IN A PERENNIAL HOTBED - Could the Israel-UAE deal be a harbinger of a new era in the Middle East?

I DON’T NEED THIS KIND OF GRIEF - Law-enforcement morale in mid-2020 America.

Monday roundup

The White House is bad-mouthing Dr. Fauci. It's sent sent a document to various media outlets that enumerates several instances in which the administration says he's been wrong about the coronavirus.  But if very many of the examples are like this one, it's pretty weak tea:

One example in the short document is a comment made by Fauci on NBC's Today Show in late February that "at this moment, there is no need to change anything that you're doing on a day-by-day basis."

However, that was not the full statement Fauci made during the interview.

"Right now the risk is still low, but this could change," Fauci also told the Today Show at the time. "When you start to see community spread, this could change and force you to become much more attentive to doing things that would protect you from spread."

This woman is on the Seattle city council:

. . . we are coming for you and your rotten system. We are coming to dismantle this deeply oppressive, racist, sexist, violent, utterly bankrupt system of capitalism. This police state. We cannot and will not stop until we overthrow it, and replace it with a world based, instead, on solidarity, genuine democracy, and equality: a socialist world. 

The all-about-me whiner-in-chief:

Callers on President Donald Trump in recent weeks have come to expect what several allies and advisers describe as a "woe-is-me" preamble.

The president rants about the deadly coronavirus destroying "the greatest economy," one he claims to have personally built. He laments the unfair "fake news" media, which he vents never gives him any credit. And he bemoans the "sick, twisted" police officers in Minneapolis, whose killing of an unarmed black man in their custody provoked the nationwide racial justice protests that have confounded the president.

Gone, say these advisers and confidants, many speaking on the condition of anonymity to detail private conversations, are the usual pleasantries and greetings.

Instead, Trump often launches into a monologue placing himself at the center of the nation's turmoil. The president has cast himself in the starring role of the blameless victim - of a deadly pandemic, of a stalled economy, of deep-seated racial unrest, all of which happened to him rather than the country.

In light of the Roger Stone pardon, does Senator Susan Collins still feel, as she did when she voted to acquit the VSG, that he's' learned his lesson?

Quotes from the VSG on the thirteen occasions on which he said the coronavirus would just kind of go away. 

At this rate, the Minneapolis city council may not have to dismantle the police force. One fifth of it is bailing in one fell swoop:

A lawyer who represents police officers has been contacted by more than 150 current officers who seek to file for disability benefits, a move taken before they leave the force. Most of the officers claim they are suffering from PTSD and that the stressful situation since the killing of George Floyd has become the last straw.

I don't really have any skin in this game, since I'm almost certainly not going to vote for Biden or the VSG, but Matthew Continetti says that as cancel culture in post-America proceeds past the general public's tipping point, lots of voters are being driven into the arms of the incumbent. Consider the choice one coffee shop owner is willing to make:

Before Thursday morning I had not heard of Thomas Bosco, and I am willing to bet you haven't heard of him either. He runs a café in Upper Manhattan. From the picture in the New York Times, the Indian Road Café is one of those Bobo-friendly brick-lined coffee shops with chalkboard menus affixed to the wall behind the counter and a small stage for down-on-their-luck musicians to warble a few bars of "Fast Car" as you sip on a no-foam latte while editing a diversity training manual. It looks pleasant enough. "Local writers, artists, musicians, and political activists are regulars," writes metro columnist Azi Paybarah. "And for years, two drag queens have hosted a monthly charity bingo tournament there." Drag queens! You can’t get more progressive than that. Bosco seems like a noble small businessman making his way in a turbulent world.

There’s a problem, though. He once expressed an opinion. Though Black Lives Matter signs are posted throughout the restaurant, and its owner identifies as "a liberal guy who supports almost every liberal cause I can think of," in early June Bosco told MSNBC that he voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and expects to do so again. Omigod no. "The backlash was swift, as you might expect," writes Paybarah. Neighbors denounced Bosco on Facebook. Some vowed not to patronize the café. Randi Weingarten, who as president of the American Federation of Teachers draws close to half a million dollars in salary and benefits, wrote online that it would be "hard to ever go back." No more tips for the barista from her. As for the drag queens, they are taking their glitter elsewhere.

Bosco is distraught. "My staff feels like I let them down to a certain extent," he told the Times. He has supported Bernie Sanders, donated to immigrant groups, contributed to the food pantry, provided child care for an employee, and plans to change the name of the café to Inwood Farm to avoid any possible offense toward the Indigenous. None of this is enough to quell the fury of the Very Online. "Similar backlashes have erupted in liberal New York City, usually after a business is revealed to have financial links to Mr. Trump or socially conservative causes," notes Paybarah, citing the example of Stephen Ross, an investor who had to cut ties to the Equinox and SoulCycle gym chains after it was revealed that he was going to throw a fundraiser for the president. "But Mr. Bosco is no Mr. Ross."

No, Mr. Bosco is not. He is instead one of the countless private individuals whose lives have been upended by the gale of righteousness blowing through this country since the killing of George Floyd in police custody on May 25. For all of the high-profile sackings, vandalism, and cancellations—the editor of the New York Times opinion pages, the CEO of Crossfit, the editor in chief of Bon Appétit, the head of Adidas human resources, the Atlanta police chief, statues of Confederates, Columbus, Grant, and Douglass, and the Washington Redskins—there have been an equal number of stories concerning absolute nobodies, pipsqueaks, formally anonymous men and women whose unpopular opinions or boneheaded errors of judgment, widely publicized on social media, transform them into public enemies, splittists, and heretics whose livelihoods suffer as a result. Andy Warhol’s 1968 prediction of the future was wrong. It's not that everyone is world-famous for 15 minutes. It's that they are infamous.

And it takes ever less time for a cultural phenomenon to go from being deemed praiseworthy to being a pariah:

What was precious and inviolable minutes ago—the musical Hamilton, for example, or Harry Potter—becomes the object of suspicion and derision. The frenzy builds on itself, and grows stronger, and doesn't know where to stop.

And even some whose woke bona fides have been in impeccable order are not okay with where this has gone:

When Noam Chomsky, who had no trouble putting the crimes of the Khmer Rouge into "context," signs a letter warning that "The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted," it is a sign that things …  things have gotten out of control. 

Sports gets less fun by the hour now. Washington Redskins changing their name even though 90 percent of native Americans are just fine with "Redskins."

A Chinese virologist who very early on - as in last December - raised concerns about the coronavirus soon ran afoul of the Chinese Communist Party. And her chcken-s--- husband bailed on her: 

 Fox News has an exclusive interview with Dr. Li-Meng Yan, a virologist from Hong Kong who says she was one of the first doctors in the world to begin investigating the coronavirus outbreak. Her investigation began on December 31, the day word of a cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan first appeared in Chinese media.

Dr. Yan’s boss told her to look into it so she began asking questions from a network of doctor friends in China. Right away she learned from a member of the Chinese CDC that there was evidence of person-to-person transmission of the virus. This is something that China would officially deny was the case for several more weeks. Dr. Yan continued to investigate but by mid-January she said the tone had changed. Her friends in China were saying they couldn’t talk about it anymore. When Dr. Yan made a 2nd report to her bosses in Hong Kong, they told her to be very careful.

Dr. Yan decided to share her concerns with a Chinese blogger based in the U.S. That was published on January 19th but it was only in Chinese. Dr. Yan notes that within 4 hours there was a response from the Chinese government which suddenly announced there were 198 cases rather than 62. She says that was also when China admitted there was evidence of person-to-person transmission. Three days later, Wuhan was locked down.
The blogger Dr. Yan had spoken to warned her that she might need to relocate to avoid trouble with Chinese authorities. She decided to fly to America but when her husband, who was also a doctor, found out, he was angry.

Yan told Fox News she begged her husband to go with her, and says while her spouse, a reputable scientist himself, had initially been supportive of her research, he suddenly had a change of heart.

“He was totally pissed off,” she said. “He blamed me, tried to ruin my confidence… He said they will kill all of us.'”

Shocked and hurt, Yan made the decision to leave without him.

Dr. Yan left the country on April 28. Her husband refused to go with her. When she got to customs in America, she told them she was there to tell the truth about China’s coronavirus response and spent time talking with the FBI. But she says that even before her plane had landed, police were sent to her hometown to harass her family.

Then in mid-May, before she had spoken to any English language media outlets, people she believes were working for the Chinese government began attacking her on social media and set up a fake Facebook profile for her. Yan says the account was used to “tell people that I’m kidnapped in the U.S., [that] I tried to lie to people, even that I have a mental disorder.” She expects things will only get worse now that she has spoken out (in English). 

"What awaits is not a womb where everyone is Oprah Winfrey feeling your pain, but the world, and there - there be dragons." A short essay on transformation by Springs Toledo at Plough.  

In the course of my research for my latest Precipice piece, I came across this gospel concert from 1955 at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. The Pilgrim Travellers, The Harmonettes, The Caravans, The Soul Stirrers, Ethel Davenport, Annette May and Joe May. This will squeeze your crotch and bring you to your knees. Don't be apprehensive. Saul went through such an experience and got his name changed to Paul and was assured of a very special place in God's heaven.

The Fulton County district attorney gets ahead of himself and causes an Atlanta Police Department walkout

In a USA Today op-ed, former federal prosecutor Michale J. Stern makes clear that Paul Howard was playing fast and loose with the procedure he was supposed to follow:

Atlanta's district attorney, Paul Howard, announced felony murder charges Wednesday against the officer who shot Brooks.

American Bar Association rules prohibit prosecutors from making pretrial statements that could influence public perception and prejudice an accused's ability to get a fair trial. Howard violated this rule by making a lengthy presentation of evidence that supported his position and ignored key facts that did not. Judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys typically refer to Howard's impropriety as trying the case in the press.

A new and disturbing allegation presented by the district attorney is that the officer kicked Brooks after he was shot. Though acts after an event can be considered reflective of an earlier intent, the pivotal actions in this case will focus on what happened in the seconds before the shooting.

In Georgia, an officer is entitled to use deadly force when he reasonably believes his life is in danger or he’s at risk of receiving a serious physical injury. When this case goes to trial, the jurors will be instructed that they must consider the context of Brooks attacking the officer, grabbing the Taser and shooting the Taser at the officer. This analysis includes the possibility that if Brooks hit the officer with the stolen Taser, he could grab the officer’s gun and shoot him.

Howard's claim that Brooks never presented himself as a threat just ain't so. He had turned to face Rolfe and fired the taser at him. A freeze frame from the surveillance video makes that clear. 

When one watches the entire video, one can see that the exchange between Rolfe and Brooks was characterized by a vibe of mutual respect. Rolfe explained repeatedly that his first concern was whether Brooks was safe to drive a car. Even after Brooks had lied about not having driven the car and had made it clear he didn't know what city he was in, Rolfe made every effort to give Brooks a chance to minimize the trouble he'd be getting into.

Brooks's sudden burst of resistance at the moment of handcuffing was an abrupt shift in the tone that had been established. When one knows a little backstory, it seems reasonable to consider the possibility that, even if he were not going to get in a great deal of trouble over this specific incident, Brooks realized that a DUI arrest would squelch his probation and send him back to prison on the four charges, including child cruelty and family battery, he'd been convicted of in 2014.

Atlanta cops were not pleased with the way Howard handled this, and expressed as much by calling in sick in large numbers just before shift change last night. 

This exacerbates a trend that was already underway before the Brooks incident. A week ago yesterday, a piece by a Tulsa, Oklahoma police commander named Travis Yates entitled "You Won't Need To Abolish Us - Why Many Police Officers Like Me Are Quitting The Force" was published and quickly became widely disseminated. On June 4, dozens of Louisville police walked out on that city's mayor as he addressed them during roll call before a shift.

The gossamer thread by which our civilization hangs is perilously frayed. With every disingenuous characterization of what goes down when a cop tries to do his job professionally and respectfully, it frays a little more.

A Massachusetts law-enforcement trade group's letter to Fauxcahontas

It's in response to her filthy rotten lie that Michael Brown was murdered in Ferguson, Missouri:

. . . a major law enforcement organization in Warren’s home state has lashed back at the Senator. The Massachusetts Chiefs of Police Association complains that Warren’s repeated attacks on law enforcement are putting the lives of police officers in danger.

In a letter to their Senator, the Chiefs call her rhetoric “appalling” and “another slap in the face” that endangers cops. They state:

Having had two Police Officers murdered in your own state, in the past 18 months, we expect our elected Officials to condemn the murder and assaults of Police Officers. Instead on multiple occasions, you choose to fan the fires of divide for you own political gains. Shame on you!

Yarmouth police Chief Frank Frederickson, commander of one of the two murdered officers, has invited Warren to spend time in a police department in order to understand what actually takes place. Warren, of course, has not accepted the invitation.

This must be kept front and center until she has to address it, in the same fashion the she had to come clean about her supposed Cherokee ethnicity.

The wheels are coming off in post-America - today's edition

3 police officers dead and three injured by multiple shooters "dressed ninja style" in Baton Rouge and a police officer shot multiple times in his patrol car in Milwaukee.

We're on our own.