Police Training

“We also have to fundamentally change the way police are trained.”  This is what Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden is saying now.  He went on:

And the idea of standing there and teaching a cop and an unarmed person comin’ at him with knife and gonna shoot him in the leg instead of the heart is a very different thing.

Never mind that a person with a knife is not at all unarmed. Never mind that the reason police are taught that when they must shoot—and as a last resort, mind you (for all that there is the very occasional bad cop)—they must aim for center of mass so as not to miss altogether, and they must take care for the people and property that may be beyond the person at whom they’re shooting. Never mind that legs are much smaller targets and much more rapidly moving.

Keep in mind, too, that this is the same Joe Biden whose home defense advice is to shoot a shotgun through a closed door, without regard for target identification.

I won’t get into how out of breath Biden sounded or the general level of coherence that seems lacking in the minute-and-a-half clip.  Just attend to that bit about police training.

This is the incoherence the Progressive-Democratic Party wants to put into the White House.

Keep a close eye on who they choose for his Vice President candidate, and then think about the 25th Amendment.

A Murder of a Black Man

Dave Patrick Underwood was a black man in front of the Ronald V Dellums Federal Building and US Courthouse in Oakland, CA. He was murdered in a drive-by shooting as part of the larger rioting and looting that’s going on throughout California under cover of “protesting” the murder of George Floyd, another black man, 2,000 miles away in Minneapolis, MN.

Underwood was employed by the DHS’ Federal Protective Service, he was on duty guarding the building, and he was in uniform.

California’s Progressive-Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom,

who speaks of the protests that followed Floyd’s death as an example of people “rightfully outraged at how systemic racism is allowed to persist,” said of Underwood’s murder that “no one should rush to conflate this heinous act with the protests.”

Apparently, Dave Patrick Underwood wasn’t black enough to suit Newsom.

Disgusting.

Biden and Lawlessness

Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden has his staff bailing out those arrested for taking part in the riots that are so dishonoring George Floyd’s death at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer and that are so thoroughly dismembering the peaceful protests of that murder and the city’s handling of it.

At least 13 members of Joe Biden’s campaign staff have made donations to a group that helps Minneapolis protesters get out of jail on bail, according to a report.

Only about a sixth of those arrested are outside “agitators,” Antifa and other Left-wing radicals. But it only takes a small fraction to ignite and keep lit the riots—they are not protests—in what is already an emotional environment like the one surrounding the murder of Floyd, and especially one that’s exacerbated by the isolation of the last two and three months caused by the various State and local governments’ lockdown orders.

Of course Biden and his staffers know these agitators are among those rioters. It’s instructive that he wants them released along with the rioter-criminals.

Never mind that Biden says out loud that he opposes cash bail as modern day debtors prison, this is what his actions say he really believes—rioters should walk. Antifa provocateurs should walk. He claims that

burning down communities and needless destruction is not [legitimate]. Violence that endangers lives is not. Violence that guts and shutters businesses that serve the community is not.

But he’s contributing to their walking.

The European Union and its Wuhan Virus Situation

In an article about the European Union governance authorities’ effort to use its Wuhan Virus situation to fundamentally transform the bloc, Laurence Norman wrote that the European Commission

set out a $2 trillion coronavirus response plan, including a massive pooling of national financial resources that, if approved, would deepen the bloc’s economic union in a way that even the eurozone debt crisis failed to achieve.
Wednesday’s proposal, composed of a €750 billion ($824 billion) recovery plan and €1.1 trillion budget over the next seven years, aims to lift the region from its economic slump, but must overcome infighting dividing the bloc.
If backed by all 27 member states, the plan would represent a historic step in knitting together national finances across the bloc. The proposal from the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, follows a similar Franco-German plan set out last week and would establish significant new transfers of wealth among members, funded by commonly issued debt.

In justification of this recasting of European society, German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz was cited by Norman as saying

the proposed assumption of debts across EU borders to Alexander Hamilton’s move in 1790 for the new US government to assume states’ debts from the Revolutionary War. But unlike the US under the Constitution, the EU remains a club of sovereign states, many of which oppose sharing financial burdens.

Missed here is the Critical Item that, before our “new US government,” the US under the Articles of Confederation also was just such a conclave of nations.

Missed by Scholz is the fact that the American States also were, and still are, far more homogeneous—in culture, ideology, views of the purpose of money, views of the role of government in the lives of men collectively and individually—than Europe ever has been or is now.

That homogeneity of political and economic principles is absolutely critical to holding together any sort of polity.

New York’s Nursing Home Intakes

You may recall that New York’s Progressive-Democrat Governor, Andrew Cuomo, ordered all New York nursing homes to accept into their midst folks who were “recovering” from, but not yet cleared of, their Wuhan Virus infections and folks who might only have been exposed to the virus.

Nursing homes house the demographic most vulnerable to the virus: the aged, many of whom also have the most virulent comorbidities.  Residents, within days, began dying of the Wuhan Virus to the extent that their deaths alone make up a significant fraction—roughly a sixth—of all the Wuhan Virus deaths in a State that has the nation’s highest number of such deaths.

Of course, Cuomo is trying to weasel out from under his disastrous order, having rescinded it only after a couple of months of dead and dying. He’s blaming the whole thing on President Donald Trump and his administration’s medical experts. Cuomo, after all, was only

following guidelines issued by the Trump administration.
The guidance [Cuomo] says [is] “nursing homes should admit any individuals that they would normally admit to their facility, including individuals from hospitals where a case of COVID-19 was/is present.”

Here’s his secretary and top aid, Melissa DeRosa, last Saturday:

Not could. Should. That is President Trump’s CMS and CDC…There are over a dozen states that did the exact same thing.

That’s a cynical and dishonest quibble. “Should” is just a strong version of “could;” neither remotely amounts to “required.”

Beyond that, DeRosa carefully omitted to mention that there also were a number of States who did not require nursing homes and the like to take Wuhan Virus-infected or -exposed patients, and none of those States’ equivalent facilities have had anything like the death rates of New York’s nursing homes.

Cuomo and DeRosa just as carefully continue to omit to mention that CMS and CDC also mandated separation/isolation criteria for the Wuhan Virus patient intake, or that these were not well followed in New York.