• Chicago police brass request vaccine updates from personnel, may deny benefits to officers choosing to retire. How it is legal or moral to deny retirement benefits was not explained.
• Mayor Lightfoot said she was not seeing any indication “that there’s going to be any disruption in our ability to keep” the community safe. This assumes the community is safe now.

The President of the Chicago Police Union estimates that starting next weekend, police staffing will fall to about 50%.  Between 30 and 40 people are shot on an average weekend in Chicago with police at normal staffing levels. With half as many police, will shootings go down or up?

The head of the police union knows shootings will go up. For all his police career, he has lived on Planet Earth. He saw his fill of shootings, stabbings, strangulations, and domestic and child abuse. But Mayor Lightfoot and her progressive colleagues believe shootings will go down. She lives on Planet Bizarro. There, fewer police mean less crime.

Planet Bizarro exists only in fantasy. What does exist are upscale or gated communities where progressives live, upscale office buildings where they work, and private security companies that they hire. So a 50% cut in police affects progressives little. It affects the poor and minorities, but they do not mingle in the corridors of power.

When primitive people were troubled by drought, they asked the medicine man to do the rain dance. If it didn’t rain, did they fire the medicine man and discard their superstitious beliefs? No, they begged the medicine man to dance even harder.

Substitute Dr. Fauci for the medicine man. How are we any better, intellectually or morally, than primitive people? They never heard of viruses. Isaac Newton and Jonas Salk were far in the future.

But we should know better. We should know that natural immunity from having a disease is usually stronger and longer lasting than immunity from a vaccine. We should know that people unrestrained by their own moral compass need to be restrained by police. We have millennia of history to guide us. If we act irrationally, it’s on us.