It’s Monday, August 12th, 2019…but before we begin, submitted for your perusal, this just in from the the Wolverine State: 

Michigan cop put on leave after KKK application allegedly found in home

 

We had to scan what follows twice to be certain we weren’t misreading it:

“…Had it been only for the Confederate flags, Rob said he would’ve considered purchasing the home anyway. But the additional find of a KKK application completely dissuaded him, he said.

“In the bedroom, right across…there was a plaque up there, all by itself,” Mathis told Fox 17. “So being nosy, I walked over there, and it was an application for the KKK. I said ‘oh no.’ I told my son, ‘don’t touch nothing.’”

Rob said he walked outside to try and calm down while he waited for his wife. “I’m outside. I’m trying to calm myself down because I was touching those doorknobs,” Mathis said. “I’m just sickened by even being in this house.”

Mathis posted the ordeal on Facebook

Three thoughts come to mind: first, “ordeal”, WHAT “ORDEAL”?!?  The POWs in the Hanoi Hilton endured an ordeal.  Mathis willingly entered a private residence and saw a couple Confederate flags and a framed copy of an antique KKK membership application.  If he believes that constitutes an “ordeal”, Mathis needs to start sporting a…

Second, we’re sorry, but “no”, Mr. & Mrs. Overly-sensitive…

Mathis said Anderson should lose his job because there “is no way a person who is racist should police the public. Muskegon is a very diverse community.”

…you can’t can a man for having two Confederate flags and a piece of history hanging inside his home just because a pair of lookie-loos found them offensive…as the City of Muskegon will undoubtedly discover if and when they fire him and Anderson files a wrongful termination lawsuit.  Hells bells, we’ll take the case on a contingencytoday!!!  And we’re only a sea lawyer.

This reminds us of the time back in 2016 Debbie Wasserman Schultz tried to paint Harlan Crow, who was about to host a fundraiser for Marco Rubio, as a racist because of his rather amazing collection of art and history, conveniently omitting any context or additional extenuating facts.

Lastly, had the would-be homebuyers been White, the police officer/homeowner Black, and his garage sporting two Black Power flags and a bedroom adorned with an autographed photo of Farrakhan, do we remotely believe the officer would be on administrative leave, let alone the subject of a city investigation?

Now, here’s The Gouge!

We kick off the Monday edition courtesy of Balls Cotton, who forwarded what could be the key to unlocking the mystery of Jeffrey Epstein’s assisted-suicide…

…along with the Word of the Day, “Arkancide“: noun (i) neither traditional suicide nor homicide, but the taking of one’s own life by two bullets to the back of one’s head; (ii) the highly suspicious death of anyone who might adversely impact the Clintons’ power/position and/or put them in prison…as this forward from Speed Mach illustrates:

Seriously, at this point, we can only theorize what happened to Jeffrey Epstein, though his “suicide” did lead Andy McCarthy to question whether he should have been in federal custody in the first place.  What we can say with certainty is Bill Clinton and a number of other members of the Liberal Elite started sleeping better Saturday night.  More on this story as it develops.

Next up, in a must-read commentary at NRO which deserves presentation in its entirety, Kevin Williamson smartly suggests Socialists examine their stand…

On Gun Control, Once More from the Top

Gun-control advocacy, as it stands today, is almost pure demagoguery.

 

The Second Amendment isn’t about shooting ducks. It’s about shooting people.

Once you really get your head around that, you can begin to appreciate the political architecture of the gun-control debate and the fundamental problem at the heart of it: The purpose of the Second Amendment is to ensure the right of Americans to keep and bear arms designed to kill people in armed confrontations, and everything that makes firearms unsuitable for that purpose is at odds with the Second Amendment.

The usual response to that goes something like this: “Oh, sure, that may have been true, once upon a time, but we no longer have a lawless frontier, and the idea of a bunch of Bubbas getting together with their AR-15s and strapping on their tactical Underoos to take on a tyrannical U.S. government in some hypothetical dystopia is an absurd and adolescent fantasy.” If that’s your argument, then, fine: But that is not an argument for banning 50-round magazines or prohibiting semiautomatic riflesthat’s an argument for repealing the Second Amendment, at which point you have constitutional license to pass whatever gun-control legislation suits your fancy.

Give it a shot.

Of course, it would be politically difficult to repeal the Second Amendment. That is by design. The Bill of Rights, i.e. America’s Great Big List of Important Stuff You Idiots Don’t Get a Vote On, is part of what makes American democracy liberal rather than illiberal. There are rules above and beyond the reach of majorities, which tend to be temporary and fickle, and those rules are there because our Founding Fathers knew that it is easy to buffalo people into giving up their own civil rights and to appeal to their baser instincts when attacking the civil rights of others. They knew from their own experience that demagogues can exploit fear, hatred, envy, and every other vice inherent in the demos.

Gun-control advocacy, as it stands today, is almost pure demagoguery. It consists mainly of urban progressives thinking up bureaucratic measures to inconvenience and humiliate federally licensed firearms dealers and the people who do business with themone of the least criminally inclined demographics in these United States. When there are atrocities like the ones in El Paso or Dayton, the Democrats will propose new measures that would have done nothing to prevent those crimes and insist that they should be enacted anyway, forsome unspoken and unspeakable reason. Point out that they don’t know what they are talking about and they retreat into pop-Freudian analysis (somebody should explain to them that Sigmund Freud was a pseudoscientific fraud whose work is taken seriously by almost no one) and maybe make a sophomoric joke about gun enthusiasts compensating for some embarrassing genital insufficiencies. Which is to say, the anti-gun effort is pure Kulturkampf, having almost nothing to do with real policy issues.

Propose something as radical as, say, actually getting off our national ass and prosecuting those who violate straw-buyer laws, or pushing local authorities to get their illegal-weapons conviction rate up above 18 percent (Hey, Chicago!) of arrests and you’ll hear an uncomfortable silence, which will not be broken until somebody calls you a racist. Hundreds of firearms purchases have been wrongly approved because of defects in the background-check system, but no effort is made to recover the guns. These are real things that can be done, but what we hear instead is cheap invective and ignorant snark. (See all that talk about feral hogs in the past few days.) That’s American politics 2019: dumb and dumber.

Neil deGrasse Tyson recently found himself the target of a two-minute Twitter hate for having the bad taste to tell the truth about what I call the “Consider the Moose” issue. We make scary movies about shark attacks, but in reality we’re more likely to be killed by a moose, and much, much more likely to be killed by a cow or a mosquito. Tyson noted that for all the attention given to the El Paso and Dayton shootings, Americans are much more likely to be killed by preventable medical errors, the flu, car accidents, suicide, etc.Often our emotions respond more to spectacle than to data,” he wrote. He was right, and that’s exactly what people did.

Properly understood, that is what terrorism is: spectacle.

We have some pretty good options for measures targeting ordinary workaday crime. We don’t have very good options for mass shootings. Which is to say, we have a few things we could do about the mosquitoes, but not the sharks. The measures that would be most likely to make a dent in El Paso–style shootings are the very ones that Democrats spent years promising us they’d never contemplate: prohibiting most or all firearms, including the ones most commonly used for hunting and other recreational purposes (the AR-style rifle is almost certainly the most popular hunting firearm in the United States) and the ones most commonly used for home defense (semiautomatic handguns), measures that almost certainly would, if they are to be effective, have to be enforced with heavy-handed police tactics including extensive searches and raids of private homes. Because these measures would be flatly unconstitutional, it is unlikely that voluntary compliance would be very high, and it is not beyond contemplation that some law-enforcement agencies or personnel would decline to cooperate with them.

If you want to try to repeal the Second Amendment, then we can have that conversation. If you’re trying to convince me that giving a $9-an-hour clerk at a sporting-goods store another form to fill out is all that stands between us and anarchy, then I trust you’ll forgive me for declining to take you seriously.

John 8:32 to the contrary notwithstanding, as we note in the meme accompanying our Quote of the Day at the top of the page, there are none so blind as those who WILL not see…nor dumb as those who WILL not hear.

In a related item also courtesy of NRO, John Hirschauer relates how…

Yes, the U.S. Has a Mental-Health Problem

What Congress can do to fix our broken treatment system

 

The Dayton killer, according to his ex-girlfriend’s interview in the Washington Post, heard voices, suffered troubling hallucinations, and battled psychosis from his youth.

But there is no connection between violence and mental illness.Say it over and again if you must, at least until you disabuse your lying eyes. The experts have spoken. CNN distilled the media’s recitation of this creed in their headline Monday: “Blaming mass shootings on mental illness is ‘inaccurate’ and ‘stigmatizing’, experts say.”

Experts say,” as employed here, means what it usually does: a handful of ideologues get to pawn off their ideology as fact under the pretense of “expertise” to those in the media eager to toe a particular line. Whatever the “experts say,” the fact remains that the untreated, seriously mentally ill (those with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, most often) are significantly more likely to engage in violence. Individuals with schizophrenia, most of whom are non-violent, still commit homicide at a rate 20 times that of the population at large. The prevailing social science on the matter suggests that at least 33 percent of mass shootings are committed by someone with a serious mental illness (even when this is narrowly defined).

It is, finally, important not to stop citing mental illness as a causal factor in mass shootings, even as advocates breathlessly hector about “stigma”. Untreated mental illness is a factor in mass violence, despite coordinated efforts from mental-health nonprofits and their allies in the media to make claims to the contrary. The American Psychological Association, no doubt among the anonymous “experts” invoked by CNN, insisted on Monday that “blaming mass shootings on mental illness is unfounded and stigmatizing. Research has shown that only a very small percentage of violent acts are committed by people…[with] mental illness.”

Contra the APA, it is, as noted, well-founded to tie mass shootings to mental illness. As Dr. E. Fuller Torrey recently noted in the Wall Street Journal, in a report from the U.S. Secret Service examining mass shootings in 2018 “investigators found that 67% of the suspects displayed symptoms of mental illness or emotional disturbance,” while “in 93% of the incidents, the authorities found that the suspects had a history of threats or other troubling communications.” This is in line with the literature and a fair reading of the voluminous data on the subject. The clearest distillation of this point comes from this reluctant concession by University of Virginia law professor John Monahan:

The data that have recently become available, fairly read, suggest the one conclusion I did not want to reach: Whether the measure is the prevalence of violence among the disordered or the prevalence of disorder among the violent, whether the sample is people who are randomly selected for treatment as inmates or patients in institutions or people randomly chosen from the open community, and no matter how many social or demographic factors are statistically taken into account, there appears to be a relationship between mental disorder and violent behavior.

It does neither society nor the seriously mentally ill any good to deny the link between violence and serious, untreated mental illness.

There are measures Congress and the president can take to reduce what is at least a part of our national problem with mass violence: a system of treating the mentally ill that tacitly ignores the plight of its most severely affected constituents.

But not as long as Progressives continue to conflate their feelings

…with irrefutable facts!

Then there’s the latest on DOJ/FBI complicity in covering up what was perhaps the biggest political scandal in American history prior to DOJ/FBI involvement in the Russian collusion calumny, as, in a forward from Jeff Foutch, Frontpage Magazine‘s Deborah Weiss relays…

New Evidence Unveils Disturbing Facts About Hillary’s Email Scandal

FBI is implicated in destroying evidence to benefit Clinton.

 

…while Townhall.com‘s Katie Pavlich reveals…

Judicial Watch Finds New FBI Documents Showing ‘Lenient Treatment for Evident Criminal Activity

 

Any way you slice it, the FBI’s credibility has been shredded more than when Bill and Hillary denied what was, to the rest of America at the time, as obvious as the ears on Obama’s head:

Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side:

Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with the Sports Section, and a question occasioned by this clip from Mojo.com‘s Top Ten Worst Cheaters in Sports:

Listen as Shirley Babashoff, one of many elite athletes who personally watched as their justly-earned fruits of years of practice and preparation were stolen by Communism’s obsession with proving a fabricated superiority over the West, describes her East German competitors:

Here’s the (no pun intended) juice: if it’s illegal for female athletes to take/inject testosterone and HGHs to more closely approximate men so as to improve their athletic performance, and illegal for male athletes to take/inject additional testosterone and HGSs to better their already superior performance, then why on earth is it now legal for guys

…to compete as gals?!?  And how f*cked up must these poor children’s parents be?!?

All of which should call for celebration as FOX News reports the Trump Administration’s opened a…

Civil rights probe into transgender athlete policy

 

The federal Office for Civil Rights has launched an investigation into Connecticut’s policy that allows transgender high school athletes to compete as the gender with which they identify.

The investigation was announced in a letter Wednesday from the arm of the U.S. Department of Education. (i.e., Title IX) It follows a complaint in June by the families of three girls, who say they were discriminated against by having to compete in track events against two athletes who were identified as male at birth and who they say have “male hormone levels and musculature.”…”

So much for Dimocrats pretending to be the party of women.

Magoo



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