News from Chicagoland.

CHICAGO — Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot said the city will not tolerate vigilantism after groups of mostly white men patrolled the streets of the Bridgeport neighborhood on Wednesday night in response to a nearby city protest.

Multiple streets were blocked in the Bridgeport neighborhood Wednesday night as nearby protests dispersed. Near West Pershing Road, water gushed from an open fire hydrant as small groups gathered on corners. Some of the men held bats. One wore a shirt that said “All Lives Matter,” one sipped a beer and another waved at an officer as he drove by. Additional groups of people, some armed with bats, lined West 31st Street.

Asked about the situation in Bridgeport, a diversifying neighborhood that served as an Irish American power base for the Daley political family, Lightfoot said, “It is absolutely not appropriate for people to take up arms, bats, pipes, whatever in patrolling neighborhoods.”

“We’ve seen that end with tragic results across the country and we’re not about to allow that practice to happen here in Chicago. If there’s an issue, call 911,” Lightfoot said. “I absolutely support neighbors being vigilant as to what’s going on on the streets and in their blocks but taking up arms, that leads to chaos and we’re not supporting vigilantism in the city of Chicago under any circumstances.”

Bet you thought these people were anti-cop, didn’t you?  Nope.  They are anti-you.

The criminals, rioters and thieves get to do what they want.  You cannot defend yourselves or your property, so says the governor of chaos.

You see, if any in our community really believes that after all of this goes down there will be an end to no-knock raids and police overreach will be reigned in, you are a naive fool.

They intend to evict the few remaining relatively good people left in law enforcement, those who still believe in some semblance of the constitution, replace them with others (MAVNI recruits, La Raza, etc.), and turn the police against you.

That will ensure that (a) you don’t fight back when they confiscate your 401K and retirement accounts, (b) you don’t fight back when they try to confiscate your weapons, (c) you don’t fight back when they enact a bill to tax inheritance, (d) you don’t fight back when they enact a bill for reparations, and (e) you don’t fight back when they socialize medicine.

Do you see?  You didn’t really believe any of this was about the cops, did you?  Tell me you saw through all of this?

Reason.

[1.] In all states, you can use deadly force to defend yourself against death, serious bodily injury (which can include broken bones and perhaps even lost teeth), rape, or kidnapping, so long as (a) your fear is reasonable and (b) the danger is imminent (requirements that also apply to the doctrines I discuss below).

[ … ]

But in nearly all states, you can’t generally use deadly force merely to defend your property. (Texas appears to be an exception, allowing use of deadly force when there’s no other way to protect or recapture property even in situations involving simple theft or criminal mischief, though only at night,  Tex. Penal Code § 9.42; see, e.g., McFadden v. State (Tex. Ct. App. 2018).) That’s where we get the conventional formulation that you can’t use deadly force just to defend property.

[2.] This conventional formulation, though, omits an important limitation: In basically all states, you can use nondeadly force to defend your property—and if the thief or vandal responds by threatening you with death or great bodily harm, you can then protect yourself with deadly force. So in practice, you can use deadly force to protect property after all, if you’re willing to use nondeadly force first and expose yourself to increased risk.

[A.] In about half the states you can use deadly force against robbery, which generally includes any theft from the person that uses modest force or a threat: “Even a purse snatching can constitute a robbery if the victim simply resists the effort to wrest the purse away.” Some robbery of course does also create a reasonable fear of death or serious bodily injury, but in these states such a fear is not required.

[B.] In some states, there is a rebuttable presumption that you reasonably fear death or great bodily harm—and may thus use deadly force—if the target is (to quote the Iowa statute),

Unlawfully entering by force or stealth the dwelling, place of business or employment, or occupied vehicle of the person using force, or has unlawfully entered by force or stealth and remains within the dwelling, place of business or employment, or occupied vehicle of the person using force.

I think Missouri is like Texas in this regard even though he didn’t mention it.

In the Colonial era, horse theft brought harsh punishment, including branding, torture, exile and even death.  This is so because theft of the means of plowing the ground on the frontier meant relegating your family to death for lack of food.

It’s complicated.  Be sure to know the laws of your state.  For me, it comes down to this: If the person is entering the premises of your home or business with a weapon or intent to commit theft, you simply cannot trust that he will stop there.

There are thousands of instances where a thief took what he wanted and then killed the people who saw him do it.

There is also his article on The Duty To Retreat In The Founding Era.  Read this as well, and as always, none of this constitutes legal advice.  You have to pay for that.

NY Times Op Ed.

The Almighty, the maker of heaven and earth, says the following: “Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.”

Follow the Lord and live.  Follow the NY Times and perish, in time and eternity.  It’s your choice, boys and girls.  But don’t say you weren’t warned.  I’ve done my job.

Many are familiar with this video.

Fewer have seen his explanation of the event.

Science.

In the first big research scandal of the COVID-19 era, The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) today retracted two high-profile papers after a company declined to make the underlying data for both available for an independent audit, following questions being raised about the research. The Lancet paper, which claimed an antimalarial drug touted by President Donald Trump for treatment of COVID-19 could cause serious harm without helping patients, had had a global impact, halting trials of one of the drugs by the World Health Organization (WHO) and others.

Three authors on the Lancet paper requested the retraction, after initiating an independent review of the raw hospital patient data summarized and provided by Surgisphere, a small Chicago-based company operated by Sapan Desai, the fourth author of the study. Desai had previously said he and his co-authors—cardiac surgeon Mandeep Mehra of Harvard University and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Frank Ruschitzka of University Hospital Zürich, and Amit Patel, an adjunct faculty member at the University of Utah—were getting such an audit of the data, but the agreement apparently fell apart.

[ … ]

NEJM published only a short statement from the paper’s authors, which included Mehra, Patel, and Desai, as well as SreyRam Kuy of Baylor College of Medicine and Timothy Henry of Christ Hospital in Cincinnati. “Because all the authors were not granted access to the raw data and the raw data could not be made available to a third-party auditor, we are unable to validate the primary data sources underlying our article,” they wrote, with apology. By including Desai, the note perplexingly suggests he has no access to the raw data generated by his own company.

The link title is tongue-in-cheek.  There is nothing scientific about what’s going on, and this is certainly not the “first big research scandal of the Covid-19 era.”  The entire thing has been a research scandal, and the retracted study is no more scientific than the claim that masks are effective.  What kind of a “researcher” doesn’t validate the models and conclusions from the raw data?

No one to date has even approached what I said I need to conclude that wearing a mask is a good and necessary protective against a virus.  No one has even proposed such a study.

Link. [I cannot make WordPress accept the embed code, so go to the link]

But that’s not the way the international media reported it.  Consider this headline: “Vigilante residents wield their rifles as they block their street in Florida to guard against looters.”  Here is the URL.

The video of the guarding residents was filmed by a family in a passing car.

They are seen driving past them before using a roundabout to drive back the other way.

The group, who number at least 12, are standing next to their cars and some are holding rifles.

One man is wearing a military-style helmet, combat boots and pants and is holding a rifle.

As the family pass the residents, an older woman in the car says, ‘he has a gun in the black shirt’ as she refers to the man in the helmet.

A girl in the car then adds: ‘This is in Belleview.’

As she turns the car back around, the older woman then says: ‘Look at all these white people. Look at them with their guns.’

Although it isn’t clear from the video, she claims a teenage boy is also standing with a gun.

‘Look at that little boy, he’s a young man with a gun. He’s like 16,’ she says.

Vigilantes, they are.  Bad people, according to the media.  She’s too ignorant of American history to know that the vast majority of the fighters at King’s Mountain were under the age of 18.  The “Over Mountain” men were primarily boys.  Their families had to bring in the crops and do chores.  So to families singing hymns through the streets as the left on horseback, they left for an arduous journey over many days and nights to meet up with the loyalists at King’s Mountain and win what might be the most decisive battle of the war of independence, because it demonstrated to Cornwallis that his reliance on loyalists to win his war was mistaken.   But there’s more.

In Indiana, peaceful protesters demonstrating against police brutality and racism following the death of George Floyd were met with vigilante locals who were armed with weapons.

[ … ]

Video taken on Saturday in Valparaiso and posted to Twitter shows a line of protesters marching — as homeowners stand guard along a white picket fence nearby.

The tweet said the protesters were walking back to their cars along a bike trail, as advised by police “because of the amount of people standing by the street with their bats and guns.”

Vigilantes.  They used that word again.

So the thugs who throw bricks, break windows, block streets, liter the roadways, beat people over the head with boards and shoot people, are “peaceful protesters.”  The peaceful citizens who want to protect family, home and hearth, are “vigilantes.”  The vigilantes should wait on protection from the cops and National Guard troops who are taking a knee all around the country.

Light is darkness and darkness is light.  So claims the evil one.

Actually, seeing these pictures of patriot citizens holding rifles and ready to defend home and hearth makes me more confident in the trajectory of America at the moment.

America has been stomped out of its slumber and some of it, at least, seems ready for self defense against the communists.  They meet the definition of militia in the truest sense of the word and concept expressed by the founders, who opposed a standing army.

“Practice Things Like an Eye Gouge, it Takes Very Little Pressure to Injure Someone’s Eyes.”  Swell folks, they are.

I’ll tell you what though.  That boy had better not go back around those people.  His life will be in danger if he does.

So says the experts.

LONDON (Reuters) – Keeping at least one metre apart and wearing face masks and eye protection are the best ways to cut the risk of COVID-19 infection, according to the largest review to date of studies on coronavirus disease transmission.

In a review that pooled evidence from 172 studies in 16 countries, researchers found frequent handwashing and good hygiene are also critical – though even all those measures combined can not give full protection.

The findings, published in The Lancet journal on Monday, will help guide governments and health agencies, some of whom have given conflicting advice on measures, largely because of limited information about COVID-19.

“Our findings are the first to synthesise all direct information on COVID-19, SARS, and MERS, and provide the currently best available evidence on the optimum use of these common and simple interventions to help ‘flatten the curve’”, said Holger Schünemann from McMaster University in Canada, who co-led the research.

Current evidence suggests COVID-19 is most commonly spread by droplets, especially when people cough, and infects by entering through the eyes, nose and mouth, either directly or via contaminated surfaces.

For this analysis, an international research team conducted a systematic review of 172 studies assessing distance measures, face masks and eye protection to prevent transmission of three diseases caused by coronaviruses – COVID-19, SARS and MERS.

The researchers noted that the findings, while comprehensive, have some limitations for the current pandemic since most of the evidence came from studies of SARS and MERS.

Ooo … I’m askeerd, hold me Uncle Bob!

Since I’ve gone on record saying that I don’t believe them without certain studies being performed in a certain manner with certain credentialed professionals, am I now so beaten down by the academic bureaucrats that I retract my position?

Then there’s this.

They found, however, that physical distancing of at least 1 metre lowers risk of COVID-19 transmission, and that a distance of 2 metres could be more effective. Masks and protective eye coverings may also add protective benefits, though the evidence for that was less clear cut, they added.

Yea, it’s less clear cut because not a damn thing has been done to prove it.

I repeat myself.

I won’t believe any of your models or data until [at least] the following has been done.  Assemble an interdisciplinary team of experts, in fields such as industrial hygiene, air filtration engineering, physics, chemistry, and medicine.  Formulate hypotheses on the distribution of particle sizes (there isn’t one particle size, there is a distribution, and it may be a normal distribution, or it may not, it may be a right skewed distribution, or it may be a left skewed distribution); back up your hypothesis with experimental data; assemble a panel of experts to test filters of various types, from cotton, to N95, to HEPA filters, on those particle sizes; report the results; next, do the same with the [possibly] polar composition of viruses and their travelling companion water molecules or other particles, and report results; results shall at least include and consider (a) trajectory, (b) evaporation, (c) re-evolution of particles and viruses into the air stream, (d) and where the collection of particles occurs.

Determine, based on this team’s judgment, whether there is an unhealthy buildup of viruses on the masks you have tested, both for the patient and the worker (or any passerby).  Include in this analysis not only SARS-CoV-2 viruses, but other pathogens as well.  Specifically include in your analysis the buildup and concentration of Legionella bacteria, what we found to be so problematic at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel when the HVAC engineers directed intake air flow over the top of the condensate discharge from the evaporator units.  Masks collect moisture.

Considering the whole of the findings of this investigation, perform a probabilistic risk analysis for various populations wearing masks under various conditions (including people who have a low oxygen saturation level anyway).  After coming to agreement between the entirety of the committee of experts, prepare a formal report under the authority of a professional engineer’s seal and signature.  Publish all mathematical models, data and test results for peer review.  I want this seal because the researchers have nothing to lose if the contents are wrong.  A professional engineer has his reputation and livelihood to lose.

Only then are you doing science.  Only then will I believe anything you have to say.

Nothing has changed, and no one to date has done anything even remotely approaching real science on this matter.  Everything thus far has been fake.  I do science.  I know fake science when I see it.