Today’s Two-fer

Two contributions in my in-box, Delta Whiskies and Whiskettes. The first:

Ninja sends.

Rifle-Toting Vet Arrested After Dressing Up, Trying To Join National Guard Crowd Control Formation

By: J.D. Simkins

A rifle-toting veteran who once spent time in the National Guard was arrested Tuesday morning in Los Angeles after he reportedly dressed up in a uniform resembling those worn by California National Guard troops and attempted to fall into formation during the city’s anti-racism demonstrations.

Gregory Wong, 31, allegedly arrived equipped with multiple weapons after taking an Uber to the scene of the protests that have surged in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, CBS Los Angeles reported.

Once downtown, Wong reportedly joined a formation of guardsmen who had recently arrived to monitor select sites and aggressive crowd behavior — part of a 4,500-person force mobilized throughout California by Gov. Gavin Newsom, the report said.

But Wong’s time in formation didn’t last, as puzzled troops began to question the authenticity of the unfamiliar service member in the mismatching uniform.

Read the rest here: Military Times

Poetrooper sends the next one.

The ‘Institutional Racism’ Canard

It bears no resemblance to reality — not in police forces, and not in America.
By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY

About twice as many white people as black people are killed by police. In fact, in about 75 percent of police shootings, the decedent is not black. Of course, that is not what you would grasp from consuming media.

Take the website statista.com, specifically its breathless focus on “Hate crime in the United States” — counterfactually insinuating that any shooting involving a black victim must be a “hate crime.” Here’s their big headline from Tuesday: “Black Americans 2.5X More Likely Than Whites to Be Killed By Police.”

It is fiction. It is sheer demagoguery, peddled as American cities are besieged by rioters in the wake of George Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police. The falsity of the claim is demonstrated even by statista.com itself. Just three days ago, the site posted another series of bar graphs, showing that, in fact, whites are nearly twice as likely as blacks to be shot to death by police. Here are the numbers:

Year White Black

2017 457 223

2018 399 209

2019 370 235

2020 (so far) 42 31

Right underneath its chart, statista.com writes, “Sadly, the trend of fatal police shootings in the United States seems only to be increasing.” In point of fact, it is steady — and if I wanted to play games like statista.com does, by, say, weighting the numbers to account for population growth while ignoring all other relevant factors, I could even pretend that the number was decreasing. The Washington Post acknowledges that fatal shootings by police have run steadily at around 1,000 per year since 2015 — 995 (2015), 963 (2016), 987 (2017), 998 (2018), and 1,004 (2019).

As Heather Mac Donald relates in an insightful Wall Street Journal op-ed, blacks make up only a quarter of the total number of people killed in police shootings annually, a ratio that has held steady since 2015. The reigning canard, however, is that this 25 percent figure proves racism since African Americans make up just 13 percent of the U.S. population.

Ridiculous as this syllogism is (as we’ll see, it conveniently elides more consequential factors), it still puts the lie to the slanderous narrative that police are hunting down black men. Even if we ignore the fact that an increasing number of police officers — obviously including those involved in encounters with black suspects — are themselves African Americans, the percentage of black deaths from police shootings would be much higher if blacks were being targeted.

Read the rest of the article here: National Review

Both interesting reads, thanks to ninja and Poe.

Category: Guest Link, Phony soldiers, Police, Valor Vultures