Leftists Turn Schools into Thug Sanctuaries

Virginia leftists have a novel approach to ending the school­­–to–prison pipeline. They intend to eliminate the transportation component by leaving potential inmates inside the school. As part of the Stop Snitchin’ initiative, schools won’t be required to report many criminal offenses to the police.

Rick McKee Augusta Chronicle

It will be mum’s the word as far as the outside world is concerned. School officials will work to promote “restorative justice” while victims can kiss plain old justice goodbye.

The bill to keep victims and victimizer in close proximity has already passed the leftist–controlled House of Delegates and Senate and only awaits the signature of the governor to become law.

Law Enforcement Today made a list of crimes that formerly required reporting but are now optional. These include, “assault and battery that results in bodily injury, sexual assault, death, shooting, stabbing, cutting, or wounding of any person, stalking, threats, firearm, drug and alcohol violations are also included.”

The Democrat’s sanctuary for the violent isn’t limited to the school campus either. Offenses on school buses or at school–sponsored events would also be included in the legislative mandated cover-up.

This is just another instance of the left imposing their idea of ‘reform’ on an area of public life the majority was unaware was in need of reform — or in this instance repeal.

Who is the intended ‘reform’ beneficiary? Certainly not the victims or their families. As far as they’re concerned, authorities could open a pumping station outside the high school if that would help increase pipeline velocity and speed the ejection of predators. Keeping discipline problems in the classroom isn’t a teacher preference either. This only benefits an oppositional, budding criminal class and their negligent parents.

Democrats have gone from the ‘90s War on Crime to our current War on Victims,

The new procedure places the burden of going to the police on the victim, rather than the authorities. What’s worse it will make the victim look as if they are the one out for blood – since the school didn’t think the offense merited police involvement –  instead of the thug who drew blood.

Vicki Manning, a Virginia Beach school board member who hasn’t lost her mind said, “victims are going to be further victimized under this bill and the perpetrators are going to be emboldened.”

Republican House Minority Leader Todd Gilbert has a message for parents in Virginia whose children are robbed, attacked or sexually assaulted, “instances of sexual battery, stalking, and threats and against teachers and staff are not ‘discipline problems.’ They are serious crimes with real problems that need to be investigated and prosecuted.”

The absolutely infuriating part of this turn–their–child’s–other–cheek policy is we already know how the policy ends.

The last stop is Parkland High School.

The fools that ran that school system designed their own end–the–school–to–prison–pipeline. It was wildly successful. The Boston Globe found in the year just prior to the Parkland school system’s emancipation proclamation there were 1,056 school–based arrests. By the 2015–16 school year the number had plunged to 385.

The only fly in the ointment was student deaths by gunfire went from zero before implementation of the plan to 17 after the school–to–prison–pipeline was closed, because the Parkland school shooter took full advantage of the sanctuary policy.

The shooter assaulted students twice with no arrest. Made repeated threats with no arrest. He threated to kill people with no arrest. No reporting and no arrests meant there was no record in the NCIC system regarding his past run–ins with the law. Since he was a blank slate the shooter didn’t even get swept into the FBI’s ‘catch and release’ anti–terrorism program after the Bureau fielded a tip Buying a gun was no problemo.

What use are the “universal background checks” on gun sales the Virginia left is demanding without corresponding universal crime reports?

James A. Bacon ran the numbers on the Department of Education’s “restorative justice” school discipline initiative. This requires victims sit across from their victimizers while a woolly brained social worker overlooks the intimidation inherent in the arrangement.

Bacon found “restorative justice” only restores nothing. “I compiled one key indicator — the number of assault & battery (no injury) incidents reported — which serves as a rough proxy for disruptive behavior as a whole. The trend line is startling. The number of incidents has nearly tripled in just three years — from 870 to 2,423 [assaults].”

The Democrat’s new See–Something–Say–Nothing policy will only make matters much worse.

Most Virginia leftists never reveal plans for open borders bathrooms or decriminalizing crime. I give Del. Mike Mullin (D–Pardon) credit. On his campaign website, he said he’s “working to end the school–to–prison pipeline.”

But Mullin didn’t say that meant reversing the flow.

China Virus Quarantine May Kill the Economy

The politician’s response to the coronavirus is the medical equivalent of the 10 percent across–the–board budget cut where politicians faced with a budget shortfall take the coward’s way out and cut every budget.

Patrick Chappatte

Thereby treating the useful just as harshly as the useless.

Real leaders would eliminate the useless while protecting the useful, but down that path lies criticism about ‘fairness.’

The China virus shutdowns operate on the same principle and are equally short–sighted.

Anyone under age 55, without an underlying health condition, has an infinitesimal chance of dying from the China Flu. And the entire US population has a smaller chance of catching the Kung Flu than breathless OpMedia reports would have one believe.

Let’s take the Diamond Princess’ Fabulous Contagion Cruise. There were a total of 3,711 passengers and crew aboard. After the disease was detected the ship was put under an enforced quarantine.

The general consensus is the so–called quarantine was a FEMA–sized disaster. Wired quotes Kentaro Iwata, an infection control specialist at Kobe University, who said the effort “violated all infection control principles.” Yet the aftermath wasn’t a disaster.

The ship was effectively an infection Petri dish for the Wuhan Flu, with much more exposure to the disease than would normally be expected. A total of 705 were infected. That’s an infection rate of only 19 percent after hanging around the Contagion Buffet for weeks. To put that in context, the Diamond Princess worst case scenario for infection was less than 10 points higher than the US flu infection rate of 11 percent, which is held down because 45 percent of the population gets a yearly flu shot.

WoePost figures for Wuhan were even better. There about 1 out of every 200 people exposed became infected. Of the infected, 99 out of 100 recovered. As Obama’s former CDC Director Tom Frieden observed, “The bottom line is, this is not the zombie apocalypse. We’re not all going to die.”

This is not the end of the world, but panicked politicians may make it the end of the economy.

The sensible approach is not closing the schools. Even the CDC says washing your hands has more impact on disease transmission than closing schools. There was no difference in the spread of the disease between Hong Kong, which closed schools, and Singapore, which didn’t.

And it certainly isn’t sensible to close restaurants, retail stores, government offices, shopping malls and everything else petty bureaucrats drunk on power and panicked by a disease have shuttered. Michael T. Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota told the WoePost, “Right now, we’ve got people literally just following each other off the edge of a cliff because they’re not thinking.”

“But there’s no cure!” shout news poodles. This is true. But before 1968 there was no regular campaign of flu vaccinations, yet society soldiered on.

Even in Italy, where they are stuffing China Flu fatalies into discarded pasta boxes, the news doesn’t justify nationwide shutdowns here. Journalist Sharyl Attkisson writes: “Italy has the oldest population in Europe and more elderly per capita than the U.S. Most of the Italian deaths are in patients in their 80s and 90s.”

This is the Shèhuì bǎozhàng Flu. (That’s Mandarin for Social Security.)

Instead of industry–wide shutdowns and curfews, authorities should order everyone aged 55 and above to self–quarantine. Keeping those under 55 on the job would greatly mitigate the impact on the economy and the taxpayer.

Citizens under a self–quarantine would telework. If that option was unavailable then they should be able to apply for already existing unemployment insurance programs — supplemented by federal funds and not by new federal programs. The over 55s would be joined by the under 55s with an underlying health condition that would make the virus more dangerous to them.

This step would vastly reduce the disruption to the economy and concurrently reduce the cost of federal ‘stimulus’ programs. More important, it would let people take control of their own disease prevention measures.

US grocery stores could emulate the Australian Woolworth grocery store’s “Elderly Only” shopping hour. The most vulnerable, yet mobile, seniors can do their shopping without exposure to younger potential disease carriers. It would make sense for gyms and restaurants to do the same.

After two weeks or so people between 55 and 60 could be released from self–quarantine. Yes, some would get the China Flu, but a limited age group wouldn’t overwhelm hospitals. Continue to release age groups over time until the threat is passed.

Our current one–size–fits–all quarantine is misdirected, poorly targeted and becoming universal.

As this is written even Texas has succumbed to hysteria and imposed mandatory quarantines. Proving herd mentality is even more contagious than the Wuhan Flu.

Media Focused on Blaming Coronavirus on Trump

After years of Russia, Russia, Russia and a few months of Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine we now have another bunch of foreigners interfering in our presidential election. The difference is the Opposition Media welcomes this interference because of the damage it may do to President Trump’s re–election.

Gary@GaryMcCoy.org

While Russian ‘interference’ was invisible and the results negligible, Chinese interference, while also invisible, has very tangible results.

The natural, catchy term for his interference would be the Chinese Flu. It’s not entirely precise, but it hits the bullseye on the origin of the disease. Unfortunately, the Speech Police has managed to persuade itself that the most populous nation on earth is inhabited solely by minorities.

That makes any reference to China that contains even the slightest intimation of disease automatically ‘racist.’ So we’re stuck with coronavirus for the duration of the epidemic.

The geographic origin of the disease is immaterial to the left. As far as they’re concerned the coronavirus is a godsend. Dead Americans and an economy on life support are a small price to pay for the left and its media stenographers, if it beats Trump in November.

US deaths and economic upheaval aren’t the fault of a bunch of bat–eating Chinamen. The fault belongs to Trump as far as the OpMedia is concerned. The playbook will be the same one used in the aftermath of Puerto Rico’s Hurricane Maria.

Trump was blamed for power outages, supply snafus, destroyed homes, damp tortillas and deaths that occurred weeks after the hurricane.

Three years later, it turns out hurricane aid failures weren’t Trump’s fault after all. Puerto Rican relief officials are indicted for corruption and it’s discovered other incompetent Puerto Ricans managed to misplace warehouses full of relief supplies. But the damage to Trump’s reputation is already done.

Which was the goal all along.

Currently the focus of the left’s wrath is on the lack of coronavirus test kits. Until Trump acted, any disease testing kit had to receive approval from the FDA before it could be used in the field. That meant there were only federal testing kits when the coronavirus hit, because no one else wanted to jump through FDA hoops on the off chance there might be a disease to test in the future.

The US was dependent on a sole–source provider, the CDC, who manufactured a faulty test. It was another in a long line of government healthcare failures. Trump pointed out this fact and ordered an expedited approval process.

In gratitude the OpMedia has accused Trump of lying and personally blamed him for the shortage of test kits.

A story in the rabidly anti–Trump Daily Mail makes my point. Leftist stenographer Emily Goodin writes, “Donald Trump doubles down on discredited claim OBAMA is to blame for lack of coronavirus testing kits.” Note the all–caps “OBAMA.” That means criticizing The One is heresy and totally out of bounds for decent people.

Emily mentions the test controversy twice the first time “a claim that has been debunked” and the second time, “an accusation that has been shown not to be true.”

She doesn’t even bother to inform readers who was doing the “debunking.” Not so much as a single, lying anonymous source. We’re just supposed to take Emily’s word for it.

There is a problem with that. In the same March 6th issue there’s another story that proves Trump was right all along.

This concerns a North Carolina company that has produced a coronavirus test that is already being used in China, “helping officials there to diagnose more patients, faster.” The test is also being used in South Korea, Japan and Italy.

So if it works, why isn’t the test available here? “But the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has not approved the test under the emergency measure it announced Saturday.”

Proving there was an Obama–era rule change that Trump had to alter. Even the CDC was hamstrung by the Obama micromanagement. Rather than devise a new test, the CDC opted to fix the faulty test. That would be faster, because “even when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) itself developed a test, it had to get approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) before distributing it.”

The reason we can’t test for coronavirus like we should and we don’t have nearly enough tests is not Trump’s fault. The delay and consequent response missteps are due solely to the dead hand of Obama functionaries’ micromanagement and control–freakism.

That’s not an explanation you’ll get from the left, which is busy burying the truth beside coronavirus victims. If the OpMedia has its way, you’ll learn what really happened regarding the coronavirus test kit shortage sometime during Gropey Joe Biden’s first term.

Genius Republican Pins Himself to the Mat

Political ju–jitsu is a complicated and demoralizing technique that takes something your opponent considers a strength and turns it against him. Sen. Kamala Harris experienced this during her brief presidential campaign.

GaryMcCoy.org

She considered her stint as California Attorney General an asset because Harris felt it proved her toughness to voters skeptical of a one–term female senator running for the nation’s highest office. She forgot she’s a member of a party that considers obeying the law to be optional for anyone with skin tones darker than Johnny Winter.

Putting people in jail didn’t prove toughness to that electorate, it proved a willingness to oppress minorities. Faster than you can say Harai Goshi a former asset became a liability.

President Trump has also been known to dabble in political ju–jitsu. After New York passed the ‘Green Light Law’ — that gave driver’s licenses to illegals and denied feds access to the driver’s license database lest it be used to find illegals — Trump retaliated by removing New York from the Global Entry and Trusted Traveler programs.

That means about 175,000 New Yorkers will be shuffling barefoot through the TSA’s full–body grope line instead of the expedited shoes–on lane. Think citizen’s caravan.

Suddenly the state’s catering to illegals penalizes citizens. A strength – the future votes of leftists from a variety of failed Latin American states – becomes a negative when affluent members of the Trusted Traveler programs start complaining.

When political ju–jitsu is skillfully executed there’s a certain symmetry to the resulting downfall.

When the attempt is not well planned, the failure is equally spectacular. Just ask mental giant Del. Wendell Walker. The reigning Wile E. Coyote of Virginia Republican politics.

Before Virginia leftists began their wholesale assault on the Constitution, they were already active in the statue removal. In Charlottesville they targeted a monument to Gen. Robert E. Lee. The effort was blocked by a state law that prohibited freelance historic desecration.

Now the left controls both houses of the legislature plus the governor’s office. Once the 2nd Amendment is nullified, it’s only a matter of time before statue recycling becomes a pressing issue. So Wile E. Walker decided to block the left with his new Acme Statue–Saver Legislation.

The WoePost reports, Walker’s bill “calls for ridding Richmond’s Capitol Square of a 10-foot statue of Harry Flood Byrd, the former Democratic governor, U.S. senator [and] kingmaker …who dominated Virginia politics for 40 years.”

Walker was quite proud of his strategery. “It’s kind of like playing chess,” said Del. Walker who hoped the bill would make Democrats think twice about removing any statues. “You’re just calling somebody’s bluff.”

In reality it’s like taking the Napalm Challenge.

Walker’s brainchild is the political ju–jitsu equivalent of grabbing the back of one’s shirt and throwing yourself off the roof.

Harry Byrd was a racist who wasn’t even a Democrat when he died. The Post has a nice summary of Byrd’s legacy, “Byrd engineered the state’s opposition to [school integration] which included denying funding to integrated schools, authorizing the governor to close them and providing tuition grants to students attending segregated private academies.”

The current Virginia Democrat delegation includes a genuine socialist, a male gender–bender, Soros and Bloomberg tools, various America–haters, wild–eyed feminists, minority ethnic supremacists and Reconquista activists.

And genius Walker thinks Democrats will be taken aback by a proposal to remove a statue of Harry Flood Byrd?

Name a white guy whose statue the left doesn’t want to remove! (No fair answering Lenin.)

Del. Jerrauld Jones can hardly wait to fire up the jackhammer, “I would love to see [the Byrd] statue come down. It’s the statue that makes me most upset. You think about being the mastermind of racist policy and segregationist policy in the 20th century. We’re not that far removed.”

Walker was basking in his own glory until feedback started arriving. One Democrat in his district wrote, “this is the best thing I’ve ever heard you say.” Then leftists in the legislature began lining up to ask to join him as co–sponsors of the bill.

That’s when it finally dawned on Walker, “[My bill is] just going to open the door for a lot more [statue removals]. And I hate to be part of something that would be destroying our history and our heritage.”

A panicked Walker asked House Speaker Eileen Hyphen (D–NOW) to put him out of his misery and kill the bill. Democrats were enjoying his discomfiture too much for that. Walker was told to appear before the House Rules Committee and explain why.

Walker didn’t and went home instead. His bill lives on as a monument to Walker’s intellectual laziness and political incompetence. It also serves as a metaphor for why Republicans are now in the minority in Virginia.

Science Discovers the Benefits of Christianity

CNN issued a study a while back that found regularly attending church may increase a Christian’s lifespan while at the same time helping “them stay grounded and [providing] spiritual guidance.” I’m guessing this positive benefit results from the additional sleep gained by snoozing during boring sermons.

Gary McCoy

Regular readers know this column normally takes a dim view of social “science” studies, but an exception will be made in this instance for two reasons. First no taxpayer dollars appear to have been wasted and two, there is no evidence of confirmation bias. The results no doubt came as a real shock to the Harvard team analyzing the data.

Specifically Prof. Tyler VanderWeele crunched the numbers from 75,000 nurses as part of a Nurses Health Study. This study asked if participants regularly attended Protestant or Catholic services during a 20–year period covering.

What the team probably expected to find was over the years — as the curve of history bent toward bathroom chaos — church attendance would drop off and attendance at homosexual weddings would increase, while those still clinging to church would show signs of clinical depression.

And there would be a statistically significant boost in Wicca adherents.

None of that happened. Instead researchers “found that women who went to church more than once a week had a 33 percent lower risk of dying during the study period compared with those who said they never went. Less-frequent attendance was also associated with a lower risk of death, as women who attended once a week or less than weekly had 26 percent and 13 percent lower risk of death, respectively.”

It’s obvious a nurse attending church events more than once a week wouldn’t have time for any vice as time–consuming as alcoholism, so cirrhosis was certainly out. But that’s not the only dangerous habit church helped avoid. Regardless of how inspiring the sermon was, these women “also had higher rates of social support and optimism, had lower rates of depression and were less likely to smoke.”

These results are enough to send pastors, priests and the chairmen of building committees jumping for joy, but Harvard scientists were, to put it mildly, less enthusiastic. Although it pains him so say so, those homo–haters may be on to something: “Our study suggests that for health, the benefits outweigh the potentially negative effects, such as guilt, anxiety or intolerance,” VanderWeele sniffed.

The study didn’t include other religions, although dietary restrictions alone would appear to give Orthodox Jews a leg up. On the other hand, results for Islam would be very dependent on whether or not the mosque offers advanced explosive classes.

Naysayers pooh–pooh the results by contending church attracts people who are already healthy, since they are more mobile. This just proves those atheists have never attended a traditional service — also known as the “assisted living” service — in a Baptist church. There the sermon and gentle hiss of portable oxygen serves to lull everyone to sleep.

Even with the results in, the meaning appears to elude our secular observers. CNN interviewed Dr. Dan Blazer of Duke University who contends that since most Americans tell pollsters they are “spiritual” going to church puts their actions congruent with their beliefs.

But people don’t go to church because they are “spiritual,” they go to church because they are Christians. The “spiritual” people are communing on the 9^th hole or contorting themselves into yoga pants.

Blazer said the jury is still out on whether praying and reading the Bible also increase longevity, but like the Jewish grandmother says, “It couldn’t hurt!”

One almost feels sorry for the good doctors. Heretofore they had pitied these poor, superstitious people with their invisible deity. Science was perfectly willing to let them practice their harmless rituals as long as it didn’t interfere with the catering at same–sex weddings.

But now Baptists have managed to extend life and worse yet, they are doing it to conservatives!

How do they approach these people? It’s more awkward than Mike Bloomberg dining on scrapple with a coal miner.

Blatz is ready to delegate contact to primary care doctors. “…the doctor can help ensure they maintain a good relationship with their church, temple or mosque.” In other words take two Sunday services and one dinner in Fellowship Hall and call me in two weeks.

The truth is Christianity is a social engineer’s dream. A study in the UK, reported by The Telegraph, found religious people “are healthier and take fewer sick days.” In addition, “more religious a person is, the less likely they are to suffer from anxiety, depression or exhaustion.”

This is fiscal heaven in connection with Medicare for All. Fewer users mean lower costs. Backsliders thinking about jettisoning God, Jesus and sin, may discover under Bernie’s administration that HHS has made Christianity mandatory for everyone baptized before 2020.