The problem with "the police"

The problem with "the police" is not "structural racism" or "systematic racism" or "the legacy of slavery" any other Democratic Party lie; the problem with "the police" is that the policing power is being used by *all* levels of government as a revenue-generating scheme. The problem with "the police" is that they are responding, as all humans do, to incentives ... but, the incentives are perverse.


Remove the perverse incentives, that is, take away the ability of government bureaucracies to profit by the fines and penalties they impose, and most of the problems with "the police" will solve themselves.

Here is one way that can be done --

When a citizen is fined by a government entity, the monies -- including "court costs" -- are forwarded to the local government where the citizen lives (*), where the total of those monies is used to reduce the tax burden of *all* citizens subject to that government entity. That is, the monies are not *added* into the budget of the government entity, but rather reduce the amount of the existing budget to be extracted directly from the citizens.

For example, property taxation is almost universal. If a county is scheduled to raise $10 million in property taxes, and the total fines and penalties imposed on the citizens of that county for that year somehow also amounted to $10 million, then no one would have to pay property tax that year, and the county would still have the amount for which it had budgeted.


(*) this is to remove the temptation to live off the backs of out-of-towners.

The Chinaman's Cough and me

I was a computer programmer my entire adult life. I've retired from that. Since last year, I've been working for a non-emergency medical transportation company (*), driving a wheel-chair van. Most of the people I transport(ed) are on dialysis, quite a few (whether or not on dialysis) are in nursing homes.

I was beginning to worry back in early March, both for my own safely, but even moreso for our clients. Back in those days, it was being reported that one might be infected and spreading spreading the virus for as much as two weeks before showing any symptoms oneself. My great fear wasn't that I'd catch it, but that I'd catch it and spread it without knowing I had it.

I had scheduled to be sure I wasn't working on Saturday, March 14; planning to go visit my family in Indiana. My sister called the afternoon of the 13th to suggest I delay the trip, in case I couldn't get gas for the return trip -- panic-buying hadn't yet hit my area in Ohio, and the various governments in the US had not yet announced that they were going to destroy the economy, but she suspected that that was on the way.

Then, that night, I woke up sick. So, I didn't go to work for the next week and a half. I was scheduled to work on Wednesday, March 25 -- one trip only (but the guy cancelled as I was on my way to get him): in that week and a half that I'd been home mildly sick, everything had crashed, and just about the only trips my company was still making were for dialysis.

Since there wasn't enough work for all the drivers, and since I can get by without the income from that job, I told them to give preference to drivers who need the income. So, for the next couple of weeks, they called me every day with the message that I wasn't scheduled to work the next day. Then, a couple of weeks ago, they shut down operations entirely ... until July 1 (or even later).

So, I haven't worked, or earned any money, since March 13. And, while I can get by without that income -- at any rate, until the economy collapses and destroys my IRAs -- I *had* budgeted for it, including that I'd not even need to touch the IRAs, but rather let them grow.

I don't *know* that I've already had the Kung Flu (if I did, for me it presented as a very mild flu) -- for, despite that they seemingly have a levy request at every (**) election (**'), the local Board of Health (as also the State Board) was utterly useless. The bureaucrats didn't even extend their hours ... which were already shorter than people with real jobs work.



(*) I could easily be earning 2 or even 3 times what they pay me were I to un-retire.

(**) At any rate, seemingly every off-election, preferably the primary. The only time a levy request is on the ballot during a general election is if it has previously failed to pass.

(**') Either: "This is not a new levy, so renew it!" or, "This new levy will cost the average homeowner only $.35 a day, so pass it!"

What if?

What if --

What if "Supreme Leader" Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is not *really* the ruler of the Iranian regime? What if the *real* ruler of Iran was the regime's late terrorist mastermind, General Qassem Soleimani?

What if there is no clear successor not only to the Iranian regime's terrorist-in-chief, but also none to the entire terrorist regime itself?

What if the Iranian people -- who clearly hate the regime -- are now able to overthrow it, as its various members flail about, each trying to assert his own supremacy?

What if Trump has just done more to promote peace in the world than any US president since Ronaldus Magnus (and certainly more that a certain "Nobel Peace Prize awarded" alleged president)?

What is it with people?

One of the main reasons I've grown bored with trying to engage with human beings on-line is that *almost all* of them do what I will illustrate here --

Recently, 'Neo' posted this thread: Did you know that black people should never be accused of anti-Semitism?

I made this comment --

"Black people who have developed anti-Semitic viewpoints have done it mostly for two reasons."

I suspect that there is a third reason: possibly more important, if more diffuse, than the two you found — During the so-called Civil Rights Era (all genuflect), a lot of Southern blacks spent a lot of time working with, and being condescended by, a lot of Northern “Jews” (by which I mean atheistic leftists whose grandmothers were Jews). Blacks can recognize condescension as well as anyone else; and condescension calls forth disdain.

She replied --

Oh, so the Jews that helped black people in the South back then, often at the risk of their lives and sometimes even giving their lives to the cause, were obnoxiously arrogant little snobs who deserved to be hated?

I pointed out that she had utterly "misunderstood" (*) what I wrote --

neo, with the ‘open mind’, totally not turning what I wrote (which is up there in black and white) on its head: “Oh, so the Jews that helped black people in the South back then, often at the risk of their lives and sometimes even giving their lives to the cause, were obnoxiously arrogant little snobs who deserved to be hated?”

Way to go!

But, yes, the leftist carpet-baggers who bungie-flooded the civil-rights organizations in the South in those days contained a high proportion of “obnoxiously arrogant little snobs” … who called forth a corresponding disdain amongst many blacks toward “Jews” … and, sadly, Jews.

And I expanded on that --

Moreover —

neo: “Oh, so the Jews that helped black people in the South back then, often at the risk of their lives and sometimes even giving their lives to the cause …”

These are leftists you’re committing hagiography upon.

Leftists don’t give a damn about justice (except in the negative sense, as they *hate* justice).

And leftists don’t give a damn about *actual* human beings, and they have even less regard for “persons of color” than they do for other persons.

These statements are true now, and they were true then.

So, whatever those leftists may have been doing in the South, and whatever cause some of them may given their lives for, it was never their intention to help black Americans, nor to foster justice for them by ending the Democrat’s legalized-and-enforced injustices against black Americans.

And she doubled-down --

Ilion:

Your comments convey quite a bit, and I did not accuse you of anything that wasn’t implicit in your comments.

Leftists are not all demons. Some are misguided – especially during the era we’re talking about. One entire wing of my family when I was growing up (not my nuclear family, but my larger family) were leftists. Communists, to be blunt, for some of them anyway. I have written about this before.

Not all Communists who went down to help black people were Jews, and not all Jews who went down there to help black people were Communists, by the way. Some were garden-variety liberals. You haven’t a clue whether most of them were condescending or not, personally, to the black people with whom they worked – even if you were one of those black people they worked with in the 50s and 60s (in which case you wouldn’t have known enough of them to say what the majority were like). But I am fairly confident that you were not one of those black people they worked with back then.

I can assure you that whatever faults the leftists I knew back then had – and they had plenty – most of them were not condescending to black people. They were genuinely outraged at the genuine discrimination black people had to suffer particularly in the days of segregation, and even for many years after that.

I had started to attempt, once again, and explicitly this time, to show her how she is misinterpreting and misconstruing what I wrote. But then I remembered that I've been through this before, that this is precisely *why* I had stopped reading and commenting on her blog in the past.

So, I'm not going to waste any more of my time.

(*) The "scare quotes" are because this is not the first time she has done this to me ... or to others.