90 Miles From Tyranny

Friday, June 26, 2020

This Is When The Shit Hits The Fan....

Good News, Bad News: Why Aren't Spiking Coronavirus Cases in Emerging Hotspots Crushing Hospitals?

As new coronavirus cases surge across a large swath of the country, with real spikes occurring in certain states, what are we to make of what's happening? It's undoubtedly true that increased testing is leading to increasing raw numbers of people testing positive, which helps explain a significant portion of this effect. But that's not the whole story, as infection rates are also up in places like Florida (though they're roughly stable nationally). Gov. Ron DeSantis has conceded this point, which was echoed by one of the state's GOP Senators, himself a former governor. That said, there are less worrisome statistics that mitigate the serious jumps in cases we're seeing. What's going on? Let's start here:

The trend looks similar in one of the largest states in the country, whose Republican governor started opening the economy back up on May 1:

The Trump administration is also highlighting the fact that daily US coronavirus deaths fell in recent days to the lowest number since the month of March. That's welcome news, no doubt, but COVID deaths lag several weeks behind infections, so the current snapshot on that metric could deteriorate shortly down the line. These data points, however, appear to be more hopeful:

It would have sounded farfetched just weeks ago. It doesn’t anymore.

As the city of Minneapolis moves to dismantle its police force, Minnesota state Rep. Steve Green on Tuesday stated the obvious that virtually everyone else has been tiptoeing around and pretending isn’t there: “What you’re looking at, in my humble opinion, is communism moving into Minneapolis and St. Paul.” And not just Communism, but the Leftist/Islamic alliance. Green asserted that Antifa and Muslim organizations plan to “police Minneapolis under Muslim rule.” Those who scoff at such a notion simply aren’t paying attention to recent developments.

The Minneapolis City Council voted two weeks ago to abolish the city’s police force. Its plans beyond that have so far been sketchy, but something is going to have to be put in place as an alternative to the police. The New York Times noted that “many have called for relying more on self-policing by the community, in the way attendees often do at events like music festivals, with the police stepping in only when a true emergency arises. Some cited as an example how, in the days after the killing of Mr. Floyd, teams made up of dozens of members of the American Indian Movement patrolled streets and directed traffic in the Little Earth housing community in Minneapolis.”

If members of the local community end up policing Minneapolis, what might that look like? Back in 2016, a series of Minneapolis Muslims in man-on-the-street interviews stated matter-of-factly that they preferred Islamic law over American law. We have seen Sharia patrols in Germany, Britain, and even New York City, where the Muslim Community Patrol (MCP) is decked out in uniforms that strong resemble New York Police Department uniforms, and drives cars carefully designed to look like NYPD cars, to enforce “fundamentals of the Sharia.”

Muslim leader Siraj Wahhaj explained what that meant: “The mosques need protection and the MCP cars can help stop people who were not following the rules and regulations of the sharia, doing what they’re not supposed to...