- The Minneapolis City Council appears to be pumping the brakes on its desire to de-fund the police department.
The Minneapolis City Council’s resolve to end the city’s police department has lost momentum, the result of the failure to get the question before voters in November and council members’ diverging ideas on the role of sworn officers in the future.
In the three months since nine council members pledged to end the department following George Floyd’s killing, the city has experienced a surge in violent crime, another night of unrest and blowback from residents who felt they had been left out of the initial conversations about change.
Some council members have remained consistent in their statements about policing, while others have softened their rhetoric, saying now that they do envision officers as part of any revamping of public safety.
Actually, the denigrating rhetoric & hostility levied towards the MPD by the City Council et al may have unwittingly led to cutbacks in the department.
It hasn’t lost momentum, the City Council simply switched tactics to disband the police by hiring freeze, early retirements and disability. From my analysis, MPD has <600 active officers, down 25% from the start of 2020. Now there’s no patrolling & 911 response is > 1 hour. https://t.co/dLQSJtTMGH
— Howard Root (@RootHoward) September 6, 2020
I've said it before, but it bears repeating. The city of Minneapolis definitely deserves better unless residents choose to reelect Mayor Jacob Frey and all members of the current city council next year.
- My wife and I finally got around to seeing Bohemian Rhapsody, the biopic of British rock group Queen. It's downright uncanny how actor Rami Malek resembled both 1970s and 1980s Freddie Mercury. And the culmination of the movie featured the band's performance at 1985's Live Aid in London. It had me believing I was watching actual footage of the event.
Anyhow, I highly recommend.
- Remember how certain Hollywood production companies and actors/actresses vowed to boycott projects filmed in Georgia due to the state's passage of an abortion ban beyond 20 weeks pregnancy? Apparently one large entertainment conglomerate is cool with doing business in a country rampant with actual tyranny and egregious human rights abuses.
Disney filmed “Mulan” in regions across China (among other locations). In the credits, Disney offers a special thanks to more than a dozen Chinese institutions that helped with the film. These include four Chinese Communist Party propaganda departments in the region of Xinjiang as well as the Public Security Bureau of the city of Turpan in the same region — organizations that are facilitating crimes against humanity. It’s sufficiently astonishing that it bears repeating: Disney has thanked four propaganda departments and a public security bureau in Xinjiang, a region in northwest China that is the site of one of the world’s worst human rights abuses happening today.
More than a million Muslims in Xinjiang, mostly of the Uighur minority, have been imprisoned in concentration camps. Some have been released. Countless numbers have died. Forced sterilization campaigns have caused the birth rate in Xinjiang to plummet roughly 24 percent in 2019 — and “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group” fits within the legally recognized definition of genocide. Disney, in other words, worked with regions where genocide is occurring, and thanked government departments that are helping to carry it out.
People often decry celebrities (i.e. actors/actresses, singers, pro athletes, etc.) speaking out on political and social issues, often telling them to stick to focusing on their craft. Truth be told, I want people of that ilk to continue sharing their worldview. By allowing these elites to let us know who they really are and what they value is perhaps the quickest method to decent human beings deciding to tune them out.
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