Opinion
Viral post from the wife of a police officer who feels her husband is in danger
At this time it is so important to keep the momentum going for systemic changes that have allowed for the death of many people like George Floyd. However it’s important to remember not to go too far. Many people have been tarnishing all police officers with the same brush. Ironically it’s the exactly the same issue society is lashing out against right now.. profiling. Just as it’s important not to profile suspects in major and minor crime investigations, it’s also important for citizens not to profile all police officers.
This post has been shared extensively and it should continue to be shared.
From the Facebook post of Ashley Anderson. Her husband works for the Indiana State Police
I’ve prayed about this for the past few days and decided it was finally time…
I’m done. I’m done. I. Am. Done… For the last week our family has been through hell. (other police families know exactly what I’m talking about) I’ve never been one to stir anything up on social media. I’d rather talk one-on-one, but this is absolutely crazy right now! I’m not posting to argue or change your opinion (I know I can’t do that on fb). I’m breaking my silence to say that the portrayal of Police on TV is not right! It’s not what is actually happening on the streets! And the overall disrespect and hate being thrown at them is unbelievable! STOP IT!!!! The Police are just as saddened by George Floyd’s death as anyone. My husband is going in to work for the 12th day today. 12 straight days… and the last week almost all the days have been from before my girls wake up in the morning to after they go to bed. Why is he doing this? Because he took an oath to defend YOU (the community)!!! He’s missed more than I could ever begin to tell you… our kids bdays, holidays, anniversaries, swim meets, dance shows, campouts, dates, overall LIFE… serving and protecting the community! He has been a police officer for 13 years and has received a great deal of hate over that time, but this last week… I can’t even put in to words the disbelief I see in his eyes… the way he has been broken down in one week from constant hate. In conversation with him he described it like this… “I’m used to being cussed at and yelled at, but never for 12 hours straight – day after day”. STOP IT!!! For 13 years he has sacrificed SO much for this community!!! And might I remind everyone that my husband is one of the absolute best Police Officers! He has had criminals thank him for treating them like humans! What he has done in 13 years is incredible, yet he is having rocks and bottles thrown at him… and having unbelievable things yelled at him – all of which are inappropriate for fb. He’s being told that they hope he goes home to a dead wife! Really! But that’s not on TV. Unless you are wearing a badge during this or have immediate family that is you really have no idea what it’s been like… because no one is telling this side. My girls have cried so much and have seen friends say/post awful things… my son has never been more angry and has had to defend his dad to people saying “save a life – kill a cop” and “if you are currently a cop, you deserve to die” !!! That’s for real people… that’s really what is being said! Imagine what is going through my kids’ heads. They are proud of their dad and have seen what he has had to sacrifice for YOU (the community), but they also see how the Police are now being hated, truly hated. They know that things have been thrown at their dad like rocks, bottles, even explosives and they are scared. I am scared. We’re scared because he will continue to get up every day and go back out there in this hate. Their dad, my husband ( and many Police officers) have kept the community safe for so long. Can you even imagine a community without them? My husband has taken hundreds of intoxicated drivers off the streets, taken unreal amounts of illegal guns and drugs off the streets and community, been fought by criminals so many times it’s scary, comforted crash victims as they wait for the ambulance, taken food to the homeless, taken clothes/toys(our own children’s) to fire victims, saved lives including a young man shot in the neck at a bar on Christmas Eve where my husband shoved gauze in the bullet hole, he’s had conversations over and over about turning their lives around and being better people, he’s shared about Jesus and plays Christian radio in his police car for them to hear, he’s conducted interview after interview where he gets a confession that has surprised even his coworkers, he’s been flipped off by a 6 year old, and had threats made to his life and his family’s, he has stopped burglars off duty, he had a gun pulled from under a driver’s leg and brought up to shoot him that my husband deflected, he has worked in the scorching heat and in blizzards, he has worked double, triple, and quadruple shifts to take down criminals, he’s been scared and he’s been exhausted, but never like right now. STOP IT!!! I’m crying and shaking, just like every day this last week. Prayers to all Police officers and their families, it is a very sad and scary time. In our home we have always taught to love and be kind to everyone (both genders and all colors and cultures). My kids are nice, and I always have told them that being told that from a teacher means more to me than their grades…. ALWAYS! Be a kind human, make someone’s day better… those are things we say in our home… always have, always will. What is happening right now is crazy and scary. It needs to stop! Love God, Love People and lift up the Police in prayer right now please!
I’m not willing to argue with anyone… I just felt the need to get one Police family’s experience out there.
Brownstone Institute
The Predictable Wastes of Covid Relief
From the Brownstone Institute
BY
As documented in a 2023 report from the Electronic Privacy Information Center, more than seventy local governments used ARPA funds to expand surveillance programs in their communities
If you ever had the vague sense that Covid relief funding worked in a manner akin to US aid packages in failed Middle Eastern dictatorships, your instincts weren’t wrong.
First off, there were cases of just outright fraud nearing the $200 billion mark with drug gangs and racketeers collecting Covid unemployment benefits from the US government, with some recipient fraudsters not even having the common decency of being honest American fraudsters.
Even worse, though, were some legitimate uses of Covid funds that actually counted as legitimate despite being laughably frivolous or clearly unrelated to nominal goals connected to public health or helping communities deal with the economic impact of the virus – or, more accurately, the lockdowns.
One of the most should-be-satirical-but-actually-real examples of a legitimate use of Covid cash was a researcher at North Dakota State University being awarded $300,000 by the National Science Foundation through a grant funded at least in part through the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 to aid her in her 2023 efforts to reimagine grading in the name of equity. (If none of that makes sense, please don’t hurt yourself with mental pirouettes.)
Other more mundane projects pertained to prisons and law enforcement using Covid relief money for purposes that extended well-beyond simply paying salaries or keeping the lights on. In 2022 The Appeal and The Marshall Project reported on how large sums of Covid money went to prison construction and expansion projects and to outfit police departments with new weaponry, vehicles, and canines. Regardless of how you feel about law enforcement or our prison system, these probably did little to stop the spread of Covid or keep out-of-work bartenders afloat while public health bureaucrats consulted horoscopes or goat entrails or their equally useful models to divine the proper time to let businesses reopen safely at half-capacity to diners willing to wear a mask between bites but too afraid to leave their homes.
Yet, of course, that didn’t stop people from trying to make the case that these expenditures absolutely were essential to slowing the spread. Often coming off like precocious children explaining to their parents how a new puppy would help teach them responsibility or an overpriced pair of sneakers would facilitate their social-emotional development by ensuring the cool kids would like them, local sheriffs and city managers were reported as claiming prison expansions could help prisoners social distance from each other, new tasers would help officers social distance from suspects, and new vehicles would allow officers to take their cars home with them rather than share one with another officer who might end up contaminating it with their Covid cooties.
But even worse than the funds that were outright plundered or just snatched up as part of a cash grab were those that were used on projects that helped further erode the freedoms of American citizens.
As documented in a 2023 report from the Electronic Privacy Information Center, more than seventy local governments used ARPA funds to expand surveillance programs in their communities, purchasing or licensing gunshot detection systems, automatic license plate readers, drones, social media monitoring tools, and equipment to hack smartphones and other connected devices.
Sometimes EPIC reported that this was done with little, if any, public debate over the civil liberties and privacy concerns inherent to these tools. In one case from a town in Ohio, approval for ARPA-funded ALPRs – cameras that can create a searchable, time-stamped history for the movements of passing vehicles – came after only a 12-minute presentation by their police chief.
Similarly, schools also likely used money from ARPA, as well as the 2020 Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, for their own surveillance purposes, although documentation of how schools used their Covid money is said to be somewhat spotty at best.
Vice News in 2021 reported how Ed Tech and surveillance vendors such as Motorola Solutions, Verkada, and SchoolPass marketed their products as tools to help reduce the spread of Covid and allow schools to reopen safely.
Some attempts such as Vice’s description of SchoolPass presenting ALPRs as a means to assist with social distancing come off like police departments explaining the social distancing benefits of tasers.
Others, however, such as Motorola plying schools with lists of behavioral analysis programs that “monitor social distancing violations” and room occupancy while “automat[ing] the detection of students who are not wearing face masks,” seem to offer a glimpse of the dystopian future into which we are heading – as do the other surveillance tools bought with Covid cash.
Maybe at some point Disease X, about which our ruling class has been warning us, will hit and the additional drones, ALPRs, and social media monitoring tools bought by the law enforcement agencies reported on by EPIC will be used to monitor adults for social distancing violations and automatically detect who isn’t wearing a mask. Maybe those tools will just be used to keep a digital notebook of the daily activities of everyone while police reassure us that they promise only to look at it when they really really need to.
In either case, though, if you currently have the vague sense that post-Covid America is a little more like a Chinese surveillance state than in the Before Times, your instincts are dead-on.
Opinion
Climate Murder? Media Picks Up Novel Legal Theory Suggesting Big Oil Is Homicidal
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Nick Pope
A new narrative is making its way through major media outlets about major oil corporations: climate change that they purportedly caused is taking lives, and they could be held liable for homicide.
In recent weeks, numerous outlets have run stories or opinion pieces promoting or otherwise examining the novel legal theory, which is the subject of a new paper published by the Harvard Environmental Law Review, according to a Tuesday E&E News report detailing the architects’ efforts to market their idea to prosecutors. The Boston Globe, The Guardian, Newsweek, Inside Climate News and other outlets have all recently published pieces promoting the idea that leading oil companies could or should be charged with murder for their role in climate change, which the theory’s architects claim has caused thousands of deaths in the U.S.
David Arkush, who runs Public Citizen’s climate program, and Donald Braman, a professor at George Washington University’s law school, articulated the theory in a March paper. Public Citizen is a left-of-center organization founded by failed Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader that, among other things, pressures American International Group (AIG) to stop providing insurance coverage for fossil fuel companies, according to its website and Influence Watch.
“Activists and journalists have called executives of major oil companies ‘mass murderers,’ lamenting that ‘millions of human beings will die so that they can have private planes and huge mansions,’ and a growing chorus of communities devastated by [fossil fuel companies’] lethal conduct have begun to demand accountability,” the authors state in their paper. “But as of this writing, no prosecutor in any jurisdiction has charged [fossil fuel companies] with any form of homicide over climate-related deaths. They should.”
The paper also suggests that the American Petroleum Institute (API), a leading trade association for the oil and gas industry, was involved in the industry’s purported attempts to obscure the effects of emissions.
“The record of the past two decades demonstrates that the industry has achieved its goal of providing affordable, reliable American energy to U.S. consumers while substantially reducing emissions and our environmental footprint,” a spokesperson for API told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Any suggestion to the contrary is false.”
The two authors contend that energy corporations were aware of the warming that emissions from their products and operations would cause for decades, and that those companies decided to mislead the public and obscure what effects those emissions may have. A similar narrative lies at the heart of climate lawsuits that have been filed against energy companies in numerous jurisdictions across the U.S. in recent years.
Arkush wrote a Wednesday piece for Newsweek laying out his theory and referencing these climate lawsuits, opining that the fossil fuel industry’s purported “crimes may be among the, if not the, most consequential in human history.” The Boston Globe ran a similar opinion piece authored by Arkush and another official for Public Citizen on March 17.
The Guardian ran its own piece about the climate homicide theory on March 21, using the headline “Fossil fuel firms could be tried in US for homicide over climate-related deaths, experts say.” Clean Technica, a site that promotes green energy, ran a March 16 piece on the new legal theory with the headline “Climate Criminals — Prosecuting Big Oil For Environmental Crimes.”
Inside Climate News published an April 4 story on the subject, using the headline “Should Big Oil Be Tried for Homicide?” and including excerpts from interviews with the two architects of the climate homicide theory. The pair suggested that the aim is not to punish individuals or seek vengeance, but instead achieve results that would prompt companies to shift their investments away from fossil fuels, according to Inside Climate News’ story.
However, Inside Climate News did quote legal experts who expressed skepticism about the theory’s merits.
“I do not believe that a criminal prosecution on homicide charges against the major oil companies is appropriate or can be sustained,” John Coffee Jr., a professor at Columbia Law School who specializes in corporate law, told the outlet.
Nick Pope is a contributor at The Daily Caller.
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