Data Comparisons

Helicopters?

40 Comments

I’m pretty sure I’m hearing and seeing occasional helicopters over my house. They are heading in the direction of Naperville. A protest went sideways in Naperville in the past 15 minutes.

I guess I’ll see what things are like tomorrow.

40 thoughts on “Helicopters?”

  2. Yeah. Guns and ammo sales are going to rise. The police are stretched thin. People are going to arm themselves.
    .
    At least for now, I’m relying on being a decent walk from downtown areas with stores. Demonstrations in parks tend to stay peaceful. Demonstration near big plate glass store fronts tend to go sideways big time. Go. Figure.

  3. lucia,

    People are going to arm themselves.

    My daughter, who lives near Philly, has been very anti-guns. She doesn’t think people need guns to defend themselves. I wonder if she still thinks that way, but I’m not going to ask.

  4. DeWitt,
    I’m not pro-gun. I don’t want to own a gun. I’m not sure I could bring myself to use one on a person. I don’t hunt, and I target shooting holds no attraction. So it would be rather pointless for me to own a gun.

    But…. honestly, if I lived near Naperville downtown and throngs of people started down the street, and the police were busy elsewhere, I suspect I wouldn’t mind if it turned out my neighbor had shotguns. . . . .

    I also suspect that if throngs of protestors started moving down streets in leafy suburbs they would find themselves confronted by some armed suburbanites.

    Things have the potential for getting even more dangerous than they currently are.

  5. I’m not sure I could bring myself to use one on a person

    I certainly sympathize. I would really hate it if I had to shoot somebody. Hope that day never comes.

  6. I will give the rioters credit this time around for at least looting some rich people stores, ha ha.
    .
    If the rioters started into residences, the shooting will start. By homeowners and the authorities. I think this is still seen as a bridge too far fortunately.
    .
    If I owned a gun I could use it. Good reason for me to not own one.

  7. Lucia,
    “I also suspect that if throngs of protestors started moving down streets in leafy suburbs they would find themselves confronted by some armed suburbanites.”
    .
    Not just in leafy suburbs.
    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8367065/Armed-rednecks-George-Floyd-protest-say-protecting-storeowners-violent-looters.html
    https://www.foxnews.com/us/black-activists-theyre-armed-protect-businesses-riots-looting
    .
    The number of predatory people, simply waiting for an opportunity to loot retail stores, injure or kill individuals, and burn buildings is freightening. Gun sales will jump for sure.

  8. Tom Scharf,
    “I think this is still seen as a bridge too far fortunately.”
    .
    I doubt it is a bridge too far, more like a combination of the rioters fearing getting shot and there being not much to steal in most residences. Why risk your life for a used 60″ TV or computer in somebody’s house, when you can load up your shopping cart with 5 new ones when you loot Target? Just not worth it. The rioters think and act like animals, with no conscience, and there are no bridges they would not cross if not credibly deterred from doing so.
    .
    “If I owned a gun I could use it. Good reason for me to not own one.”
    .
    You will only regret not owning a gun if a day comes that you need one.

  9. A writer for ESPN tweeted ‘Burn it all down!’
    then a little later complained about how they were rioting just a few blocks away and these animals needed to go home.

    Lucia, this shopping that you can walk to, aren’t those big glass front stores(with million dollar condos above)?

  10. Goshddarn protesters are screwing me up here. People are being told they can go home if access to where they live is likely to be blocked by the protests planned for today. Covid-19 didn’t keep us from getting our stuff done, but it looks like the protesters will.
    I got work to do here, darn it!
    [Edit: The fact that I’m an hourly contractor might have a little bit to do with my irritation (cough cough)]

  11. Mike N,
    I’m not in walking distance of big glass front store with million dollar condos! I”m in walking distance of strip malls– but not ones that would attract lots of looters. The main thing likely to protect me from looters is I’m not extremely close to expensive shopping or “downtowns”. I’m more “the edge of town”.

  12. It’s interesting. Not being a recognized protest expert like Thomas Fuller, I’ve never been in proximity to protests where I’ve been paying any attention, so it’s sort of new to me.
    It seems to me that here in Huntsville, the protests are peaceful enough, but nobody wants to leave at the scheduled end of the protest. The police start off asking people to leave, then run through escalating tactics to get the protesters to go.
    So far it seems to have been working OK here. There’s been some minor scuffles and a window broken, but relatively speaking it’s gone well I think. Of course, Huntsville is barely a city; we’re small. That probably helps a lot.

  13. I don’t think strip malls in Naperville are much safer than what passes for downtown. Though looters would first head to the mall and vandals might go for the car dealerships to the west and east.

  14. Uhnnmmmm…Car dealerships are not near me. They are not remotely within walking distance of me! Wrong strip malls!

    I’m on the West edge of Lisle.

    So: to the east — about a 10 – 15 minute walk from my house (assuming you walk with the intention of getting somewhere) there is a small strip mall across Maple from the Jewell. It has as dry cleaners, a nail salon, a weird kinda-sorta bar, a chinese food restaurant. Someone could trash them, but there is very little attractive-to-looters merchandise . ( I mean…. there may be some nice things in that dry cleaners. But it’s not what the pre-planning looters are going to want.)

    About two blocks further east from that, there is a Walgreens. That could potentially be attractive, but the other things in that mall, not so much. (A vetrenarian. A pizza place. Hmm…. there is a liquor store. )

    Along the way, there are things interspersed. But the space between each potential looting target is small– and once again, they are things like sandwich and coffee shops, kinder-care and so on. Not really attractive merchandise. (The looters went for merchandise in Naperville– Pandora, Apple, high end makeup, Chicos clothing and so on.)

    To the west direction, there is a strip mall that contains similar ‘not much stuff’ . It has a dog groomer, a kids dance studio, a nail salon, a martial arts studio. Some sort of religious meeting place called “Trinity”. An out of business restaurant. There’s just not much to loot there. Yes, someone could trash these places, but no one whose intention was to loot would pick these out as attractive places to march to. There isn’t much “loot” inside a dog groomers or a dance studio.

    There is a Walgreens across the street from that strip mall. That could attract people. But, honestly, if theres ” a plan” they are going to pick the Walgreens in Naperville, which is near additoinal loot. (And that’s what they picked.)

    To get to my house from either of those malls, the group would have to decide to do a sustained march past tons of place that are not loot filled. (The Sunrise old folks home. Benet Academy. Benedictine University.) It’s just unlikely they are going to wander aimlessly through all these not-loot filled neighborhoods to arrive at some other not-loot filled place.

    I’m not saying it’s impossible. But it is something of a protection relative to living within walking distance of a vibrant shopping center like Naperville or Downers Grove, or the strip mall in Bolingbrook etc.

  15. MikeN,
    BTW. I suspect you are thinking of the super-hugomgo-normous non-stop stripmall area on 59. No… that is NOT safe. Not only are there strip malls, there is a HUGE enclosed mall (Fox Valley.) Kane county and Aurora police have been doing a lot to focus protection on that entire area.

    That’s absolutely not what I’m describing around here. There are small, isolated strip malls between towns.

  16. To get to my house from either of those malls, the group would have to decide to do a sustained march past tons of place that are not loot filled.

    Yeah. In my case rioters would have to hike over Monte Sano or through Blevin’s Gap of Huntsville mountain; quite the climb either way for a minimum of an hour and a half on foot. No particular reason to hit where I live; there are richer neighborhoods along the way. I quit nagging my wife seeking her agreement for purchases to increase my arsenal once I realized this.

  18. Lucia, I thought maybe you had moved to Naperville, and were saying that you are walking distance from downtown, which have the condos above(not the Barnes and Noble I think).

    The car dealerships are on Ogden, in bunches to the east and west of you. I was surprised to see Tesla next to a bunch of mechanic shops.
    I didn’t realize Lisle goes that far west. You’re only a few miles from ‘downtown’ Naperville, could walk it if you needed to.
    The restaurant with the business dropoff I mentioned is across from Fox Valley Mall. One you get there, you no longer have a fig leaf of protesting, as there is no semblance of a downtown.

  19. I’m quite curious to see what sort of support the ‘defund the police’ idea gets in various quarters. I find it difficult to believe much of anybody (other than criminals) is going to seriously support defunding their own police forces, but. shrug. After all, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” so, more power to those communities that elect to defund their police I guess. If it happens where I live I’m moving elsewhere!

  20. mark bofill,

    “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

    That philosophy goes back to at least 1811 from Joseph de Maistre:

    Toute nation a le gouvernement qu’elle mérite.

    The literal translation is: ‘Every nation gets the government it deserves.’ His inspiration, though, was the French Revolution so the extension to a specifically democratic form of government is understandable.

    Police backing off from African-American communities leading to an increase in crime, specifically homicide, has been referred to as the Ferguson Effect. It’s somewhat controversial, needless to say. However, a researcher whose work claimed to debunk the Ferguson Effect, walked it back somewhat a year later.

    Rather than defunding the police, a call to derecognize the police union would make more sense. But I can’t see anyone who thinks of themselves as progressive advocating that position.

  21. MikeN
    Above I wrote

    if I lived near Naperville downtown

    I don’t live within walking distance of Naperville downtown! Not that it would be impossible to walk there. But it would be quite a hike.

    I have walked to the train station in Lisle. It’s a hike– but there is a cut-through between Oak Hill South and Oak Hill. I would never take that hike carrying stuff from shopping!

  22. Thanks DeWitt. That was an interesting link (the Ferguson Effect link).

  23. If communities don’t want policing then I say give them what they want. What people want is perfect policing. Police behavior should be held to a higher standard but there are countless incidents of protesters taunting police in an attempt to get a reaction. It’s ridiculous.

  24. The lock downs are OVER. Just try to threaten legal action on any business or church after looking the other way on the protesters (at least the protesters with the “correct” agenda). Even if they take legal action, equal protection under the law will get it laughed out of the courtroom. I imagine it won’t be long before businesses challenge the government, one can only wonder what arresting business owners would look like after allowing looters to roam the streets unmolested and protesters to gather in large groups.
    .
    The utter hypocrisy on Tara Reade and coronavirus protests is laughable. The usual suspects trying to explain this double standard with straight faces is mind numbing.
    .
    Example: “When you see a nation, an entire nation, simultaneously grappling with an extraordinary crisis seeded in 400 years of American racism,” Mr. de Blasio said, explaining the double standard, “I’m sorry, that is not the same question as the understandably aggrieved store owner or devout religious person who wants to go back to services.”
    .
    This is why the establishment has lost respect. They think we are idiots, or something. A huge group of healthcare professionals committed reputational suicide by signing an open letter saying this protest was OK.
    https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/05/health/health-care-open-letter-protests-coronavirus-trnd/index.html
    .
    “”However, as public health advocates, we do not condemn these gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission. We support them as vital to the national public health and to the threatened health specifically of Black people in the United States. … This should not be confused with a permissive stance on all gatherings, particularly protests against stay-home orders.”
    .
    This is just delusional. And this:
    “Provide increased access to testing and care for people in the affected communities, especially when they or their family members put themselves at risk by attending protests.”
    .
    What did they recommend for anti-lock down protests? Hilariously:
    “Lockdown protesters have a moral duty to forgo medical care in favor of those who followed the rules”

  25. Tom Scharf (Comment #185875): “Even if they take legal action, equal protection under the law will get it laughed out of the courtroom.”
    .
    Unless the judge is a Democrat.
    —–
    Tom Scharf: “This is why the establishment has lost respect.”
    .
    Indeed.

  26. Tom,
    The religious cases will definitely win a challenge. Maybe some lower court won’t rule for the religion, but now the higher courts will. Both the right to assemble and religion are 1A rights. There is absolutely no way their right to meet can go away while people are allowing huge groups to assemble.
    .
    Vis-a-vis relition, what DeBlasio said is utterly ridiculous from a 1A pov. Vis-a-vis the store owner: not so much. That’s not a 1A thing.
    .
    But, having said that, the stay at homes are over because enforcing them will now fail for being too ridiculous. Even before the riots, the county sherrifs around here were telling their governors they weren’t going to do the work of enforcing. Even if they wanted to help their Governors, the police can’t simultaneously enforce ticketing store owners while also monitoring riots.

    Even before the riots, governors and some mayors were already not doing much besides talking big to enforce their orders. There may be a few, select, situations where governors will find it politically ok to try to enforce. But really….at this point, Pritzker isn’t going to really take on the political consequences of yanking a business license from some African American hair dresser for cutting hair so she can earn enough to pay for her broken windows! He’s especially not going to do that if the state is simultaneously allowing people to meet in parks to protest! If he can’t yank that license, he’s not going to be able to yank licenses from all sorts of other people either!

  27. Mike M,
    “ Unless the judge is a Democrat.”
    .
    Yup. That’s the problem. Progressives adopt a morality which is infinitely flexible, allowing them to punish behavior by anyone who disagrees with their policies, while simultaneously rewarding those who agree with their policies, who are engaged in exactly the same behavior. This progressive ‘morality’ undermines the rule of law, and the Constitution itself. Obama’s executive order to legalize a million “dreamers” was illegal on its face, but was a progressive’s wet dream….. because it was morally “right”, and to hell with the law. All the covid 19 orders from governors are selectively crafted to maximize economic damage to small businesses, and take from the populous every Constitutionally guaranteed liberty. Progressives celebrate taking away personal liberty, always because they believe it is “right”. The older I get, the more concerned I become that the USA will eventually become a lawless country, run by fiat, with no real constitutional protections. All it would take is three SC appointments like the !diotic Sotomayor. At that point the Union may dissolve.

  28. lucia (Comment #185885): “Vis-a-vis relition, what DeBlasio said is utterly ridiculous from a 1A pov. Vis-a-vis the store owner: not so much. That’s not a 1A thing.”
    .
    But arbitrarily forcing store owners to close is a violation of the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment.

  31. Mike M.,

    Strictly speaking, it’s forcing store owners to close without compensation that violates the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment. I don’t think the Cares Act counts because it mainly covers payroll, not other legitimate business expenses like rent and doesn’t have enough funding for everyone who has been damaged by the lockdown orders. If the plaintiffs bar wasn’t nearly 100% progressive, I think you’d be seeing law suits already.

    I would say it’s a theory until it’s upheld in court.

  32. MikeM,
    I have no idea how you think it is not a “theory”.

    Please cite a SCOTUS ruling in favor of your theory. When doing so, make it specific to the orders during these “stay at homes”– not a link to a general discussion of takings.

  33. FWIW: This guy at Volokh wrote up his interpretation

    https://reason.com/2020/03/20/does-the-takings-clause-require-compensation-for-coronavirus-shutdowns/

    In general, I am a big supporter of strengthening protection for private property under the Takings Clause, and have written many works arguing the case for doing so. In this situation, however, it is unlikely that the Clause mandates compensation in all but a few cases. At the very least, there is no such requirement in current Supreme Court precedent, and—on this point—that precedent is unlikely to change in the near future.

  34. I’m seeing more stuff that makes me think that the lockdown ‘cure’ is indeed going to be worse than the disease. We will have more deaths of despair, alcohol and drug abuse and the consequences of delayed medical care because of fear of infection as well as the shutdown of ‘elective’ medical care.

    From a newsletter I receive:

    “Lives also are lost due to delayed or foregone health care imposed by the shutdown and the fear it creates among patients. …Emergency stroke evaluations are down 40 percent. Of the 650,000 cancer patients receiving chemotherapy in the United States, an estimated half are missing their treatments. Of the 150,000 new cancer cases typically discovered each month in the US, most—as elsewhere in the world—are not being diagnosed, and two-thirds to three-fourths of routine cancer screenings are not happening because of shutdown policies and fear among the population. Nearly 85 percent fewer living-donor transplants are occurring now, compared to the same period last year. In addition, more than half of childhood vaccinations are not being performed, setting up the potential of a massive future health disaster.”

    But somehow ending the lockdown is too dangerous according to the ‘experts’.

  35. DeWitt,
    There are two factors which I think are driving this ‘progressive’ lunacy:
    .
    1) Ending all lockdowns almost certainly would increase risk of death to some extent, but not at all evenly across the population. The ‘progressive’ expectation is that there would be many more deaths among the elderly to very elderly population. People below about 50 (without serious underlying conditions) would hardly be impacted at all. This sets off ‘progressives’ extremely sensitive unfairness alarm… if you can identify groups with “disparate impacts” then ‘progressives’ will go to the ends of the Earth to eliminate that disparity, independent of potential unforeseen (and even foreseen) negative consequences.
    .
    2) Progressives hate (loath!) placing a societal monetary value on a life. When people and businesses suffer huge financial losses, they defend those losses by placing an infinite value on a single life potentially saved (direct quotes from multiple Democrat governors). It is a childish, shallow, and naive evaluation, but that is where they are, and that is where they have been since I first became aware of the irrational nature of ‘progressive’ thought.
    .
    Of course some things (like ‘systemic’ racism!) are even more important to progressives than individual lives….. how many people were killed or seriously injured due to “peaceful protests” over the last 10 days? I don’t know, but at least several. Those people’s lives do not matter to progressives at all compared to the value of “fighting systemic racism”. All of the horrors of the last 10 days are absolutely worth it to ‘progressives’.
    .
    ‘Progressives’ have a bizarre ordered list of moral priorities in their Panthenon of values. I will never understand any of it.

  36. SteveF,

    The thing is, though, it isn’t monetary considerations alone that justifies ending or at least seriously relaxing the lockdowns. People are going to die because of the lockdowns.

    Interesting article in today’s WSJ comparing the US today with Russia before the Bolshevik revolution.


    Violent Protest and the Intelligentsia
    Scholar Gary Saul Morson sees disturbing parallels between Russia before the Revolution and contemporary America.

    Gary Saul Morson says he has no special insight regarding police actions and the death of George Floyd. But he does have a provocative thesis about America’s current political moment: “To me it’s astonishingly like late 19th-, early 20th-century Russia, when basically the entire educated class felt you simply had to be against the regime or some sort of revolutionary.”

    Mr. Morson, 72, is a professor of Russian literature at Northwestern University and an accomplished interpreter of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Anton Chekhov and Leo Tolstoy. Obviously we haven’t arrived at anything like what Lenin called a “revolutionary situation,” Mr. Morson says, but we have arrived at a situation in which well-intentioned liberal people often can’t bring themselves to say that lawless violence is wrong.

    Our intelligentsia think they should be in charge, like Plato’s philosopher kings, I guess. They won’t or can’t admit that they could possibly be wrong. They can’t let people worship in churches, but they can march in the streets to protest systemic racism, for which they have no solution, but not to protest the lockdowns that are destroying businesses.

    The word “intelligentsia,” he notes, comes from Russian. In the classic period, from about 1860 to the First Russian Revolution in 1905, “the word did not mean everybody who was educated. It meant educated people who identified with one or another of the radical movements. ‘Intelligents’ believed in atheism, revolution and either socialism or anarchism.

    “The idea was that since they knew the theory, they were morally superior and they should be in charge, and that there was something fundamentally wrong with the world when ‘practical’ people were. So what you take from your education would be the ideology that would justify this kind of activity—justify it because the wrong people have the power, and you should have it. You don’t feel like you’re the establishment.”

    Another marker of the Russian intelligentsia was the sheer contempt its members had for the peasants and workers they claimed to represent. “How many workers, how many peasants, were even in the Bolshevik Party? Very few. . . . Lenin’s whole idea was that ‘the working class, left to itself, will never develop more than a trade-union consciousness.’ That’s his famous phrase. They had to be led by the intelligentsia and completely disciplined. No matter what you say, they will do it, no matter how violent. They don’t have to understand the reasons, they’ll just do it. Because they’re the agents of history, as Marx described them. . . . That implies a contempt for the working class and a greater contempt for the peasantry.”

    Sounds familiar. Basket of deplorables, perhaps.

  37. What strikes me is the total lack of dissenters * in the public health community *. Sure we should have a few activists being two faced, but everyone? These are the very same people who lectured us very sternly on “science”. Now there isn’t even a single one that I have seen that will unequivocally condemn mass gathering for this protest, independent of the agenda. Mr. Cynical has reached a new level. The cultural mob has too much power.

  38. Defund the police! I’m totally for that in NYC, Detroit, Baltimore, Chicago, etc. Eliminate the police in cities that have had blue government for decades and see what happens. This is just blatant posturing. Call their bluff.

  39. Tom Scharf wrote: “What strikes me is the total lack of dissenters * in the public health community *.”
    .
    Fear does that.
    .
    I expect the struggle sessions to start soon, if they haven’t already in academic institutions.

  40. Been away for so long!
    Helicopters is such a Julia Roberts type image.
    Had to comment.
    All three sons and wives have cats, do not quite understand why but they do look cool.
    Keep safe all.

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