Posted on 05/30/2023 12:16:44 PM PDT by Starman417
About 20 years ago I read a piece about the North Miami police department eliminating the swimming requirement for the police. With a working knowledge of geography and having visited Miami many times, I thought this was a bit odd and kind of a bad idea. After all, North Miami has hundreds of miles of canals, lakes and beaches. Predictably, the reason the requirement was being dropped was because “blacks are less likely than whites to know how to swim because of economic disparities between the groups…” Basically because not enough blacks were qualifying to become police.
That was long before the cancer of wokeness had taken hold of much of America. I was dumbfounded. Nobody with a functioning brain would have looked at that situation and said we have to eliminate a key element of the job requirements so we can let more members of X group join. But that’s what the people in charge decided. If someone with a functioning brain were actually in charge they would have said something like, “If our goal is to have a more diverse workforce…” a questionable assertion in the first place “and not enough otherwise qualified black candidates can pass the swim test, maybe we should simply take those candidates who meet the other requirements and teach them how to swim.”
But that’s not what they did. And that is just another demonstration that Democrats aren’t actually serious people seeking to help the communities they represent. No, their goal was to cater to the “equity” crowd, even before it had a name. And they have continued to do so for the last two decades.
Take gun control. They have been gun grabbing for decades. They use every mass shooting as a lever to try and wrest guns out of the hands of Americans and eviscerate the 2nd Amendment. While it is certainly the case that gun violence is a problem in America, the reality is, it’s not the guns, it’s the criminals and the Democrats who pamper them.
There are 350 million people in the United States. Of those there are 280 million adults, 90 million of whom say they own at least one of America’s 400 million guns, with an average of almost 5 guns each. And how frequently do those 90 million gun owners commit crimes with those guns? Not very often.
It’s estimated that more than 80% of gun crimes are committed by people who came into possession of their weapons illegally, which means that conservatively 20% of gun crimes were perpetrated by legal gun owners. There are almost 100,000 shootings in the United States each year (not counting suicides). If we assume that 20% of those shootings were by legal gun owners, that would be 20,000 shootings. To put that in perspective, that would mean that .0002% of legal gun owners commit crimes with their weapons, or conversely, 99.9998% of legal gun owners never use their guns in crimes… As a matter of fact, despite what the Democrat media tell you, “Good guys with guns” help stop between 1/3 and ½ of all active shooter incidents nationwide. But Democrats work continuously to take guns away from all of those apparently violence eschewing citizens while at the same time seeking to free actual violent criminals from jail or prison or not send them there in the first place. And they are the ones who actually commit most of the crimes and the worst crimes, and it’s not even close. Making matters worse, Democrats rarely seek to focus on the strong correlation between anti-depressants and violence, particularly with young people. They would rather preen in front of cameras and accuse Republicans of having blood on their hands than actually focus on the real issues that spill so much blood.
And there is indeed much blood on the hands of Democrats. In what must seem counterintuitive to them, more gun control results in more mass shooting deaths. California is a perfect example. As it’s become more difficult for law abiding Californians to legally obtain guns over the decades, to the point where it’s almost impossible to actually exercise the right, the rate at which the state exceeds the rest of the country has skyrocketed: “From 2010 on, California’s per capita rate of mass public shootings was 43% higher than the rate in Texas and 29% higher than in the rest of the United States. Since 2020, the rate in California is 276% higher than in Texas and 100% higher than in the rest of the U.S.” That is partially because there are fewer of those “Good guys with guns”… In LA Country where one mass shooting took place this year there is one gun permit for every 5,660 adults and in San Mateo County, where another took place, there is one permit for every 24,630 adults. By comparison, there is one permit holder for every nine people in the 43 right-to-carry states.
Whether it’s murder on a small scale or a large, this data would only be of interest if someone were actually interested in solving the problem and reducing the amount of bloodshed. Needless to say, Democrats rarely look at the data and conclude that making it easier to allow law abiding citizens to own weapons might actually help reduce said bloodshed.
(Excerpt) Read more at floppingaces.net...
He was my favorite character on ST:TNG ...
Science as paraded is purely political.
There’s no haste nor glory in true science — it’s just the way it is.
Years ago I owned a sailboat, a 45 footer.
I had a rule that everyone on board had to know how to swim.
I broke that rule twice. Once for a black man and once for a Vietnamese.
They were to wear life preservers at all times and Harnesses if outside the cabin.
My explanation?
I want to know where your body is, if you do stupid.
Could Corn Pop swim?
Of course they do.
The totalitarian Left ignored science for Covid restrictions.
They ignore data related to global warming.
They preach about Constitutional rights, until applied to white people, religious people, actual vote fraud, or basic checks and balances.
They have an agenda of power.
Everything is either a tool or an obstacle to the agenda.
What they lack are any principles.
The author got his division wrong. 20,000 shootings by 90 million legal gun owners would be a rate of 0.02 percent, not 0.0002 percent. I wish people could learn the difference between a simple fraction and a percentage.
White Men Can’t Jump, but Black Men Can’t Swim.
Predictably, the reason the requirement was being dropped was because “blacks are less likely than whites to know how to swim because of economic disparities between the groups…”
This is just a lie. Most of those “underprivileged” blacks grow up in cities where you can enroll your kids in swim lessons at the park district for free. That’s where I learned to swim when I was a tot. The only thing stopping blacks from learning to swim is that their parents apparently don’t care enough to take them there and sign them up.
Probably just splashed around in the shallow end. That’s what all the black kids I went to summer camp with did.
My grandfather was a research scientist. My brother was a research scientist. My wife is a research scientist. I have worked most of my adult life as a research scientist. For me, the basis of science is not lying to oneself or others. One of the greatest griefs at the end of my life is how the field of science has been taken over by the political woke movement.
>> One of the greatest griefs at the end of my life is how the field of science has been taken over by the political woke movement.
and a grief that affects so many of us
Low buoyancy?
I was in the MARINE CORPS with a lot of “underprivileged blacks”, they all learned to swim or got sent back to redo boot camp, in other words “failure was not an option”!
We were dumped into the deep end in full 782 gear and expected to peel and use our utilities as a flotation device.
When we went to further survival swimming, they put us in a stripped down helicopter fuselage suspended over the pool, turned off all the lights, then dropped us in the water upside down.
We had to escape the fuselage in full gear and find the surface (scared the crap out of me), YES, they did have safety swimmers with us at all times.
That was back in 1968 and EVERYBODY learned how to swim!
Now that is good, effective training!
Effective as hell, also terrifying as all get out.
It’s pitch black and you have to figure out which way is up.
They told us let some bubbles go out of your mouth, if the bubbles go past your nose “follow the bubbles, if they go past your chin, turn around and try it again”.
They had rescue divers in the fuselage and the water with us to make sure nobody drowned, but still a hell of an incentive to do it right the first time.
If you screw it up you have to do it over and over again until you get it right.
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