Sunday, June 14, 2020

Richard Wright, Native Son

At Amazon, Native Son.




Interactive Cover

Click through, at the New Yorker:


Also:


It's performative journalism.

Brooks Nader

Wow!



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BONUS: Dave Canterbury, Bushcraft 101: A Field Guide to the Art of Wilderness Survival.

Sunday, June 7, 2020

Jennifer Delacruz's Weekend Weather

This is yesterday's forecast, from the lovely Ms. Jennifer, still broadcasting from home.

At ABC 10 News San Diego:



Dana Loesch, Grace Canceled

At Amazon, Dana Loesch, Grace Canceled: How Outrage is Destroying Lives, Ending Debate, and Endangering Democracy.



Defund the Police Movement Based on Lies

At NYP, "The movement to defund police is based on nothing but lies."


'Not My Responsibility'

Not sure why this woman is so repressed about her body, since she's obviously got enviable assets.



BONUS: At Celeb Jihad, "BILLIE EILISH."

Bella

At Taxi Driver, "Bella Thorne Shares in a Blue Bra Up Close."


BONUS: "NEW BELLA THORNE VIDEO."

Celebrity Protests

Interesting that you'd never notice these big stars in a protest crowd, especially with the face coverings.

At Drunken Stepfather, "CELEBRITIES PROTESTING OF THE DAY."

Friday, June 5, 2020

Curfew is Costly for Night-Shift Workers

It's hard out there, and leftists make it harder for everybody.

At LAT, "For night-shift workers, curfews can be costly."


Thursday, June 4, 2020

The Systemic Collapse of American Society

Wow.

This is something else, at the Unz Review, "The Systemic Collapse of the US Society Has Begun."



Tuesday, June 2, 2020

Monday, June 1, 2020

Terrifying Collapse of Rule of Law Across America

I've been waiting for this, from Heather Mac Donald, at City Journal, "Darkness Falls: The collapse of the rule of law across the country, intensified by Antifa radicals, is terrifying":

This pandemic of civil violence is more widespread than anything seen during the Black Lives Matter movement of the Obama years, and it will likely have an even deadlier toll on law enforcement officers than the targeted assassinations we saw from 2014 onward. It’s worse this time because the country has absorbed another five years of academically inspired racial victimology. From Ta-Nehisi Coates to the New York Times’s 1619 project, the constant narrative about America’s endemic white supremacy and its deliberate destruction of the “black body” has been thoroughly injected into the political bloodstream.

Facts don’t matter to the academic victimology narrative. Far from destroying the black body, whites are the overwhelming target of interracial violence. Between 2012 and 2015, blacks committed 85.5 percent of all black-white interracial violent victimizations (excluding interracial homicide, which is also disproportionately black-on-white). That works out to 540,360 felonious assaults on whites. Whites committed 14.4 percent of all interracial violent victimization, or 91,470 felonious assaults on blacks. Blacks are less than 13 percent of the national population.

If white mobs were rampaging through black business districts, assaulting passersby and looting stores, we would have heard about it on the national news every night. But the black flash mob phenomenon is grudgingly covered, if at all, and only locally.

The national media have been insisting on the theme of the allegedly brutal Minneapolis police department. They said nothing as black-on-white robberies rose in downtown Minneapolis late last year, along with savage assaults on passersby. Why are the Minneapolis police in black neighborhoods? Because that’s where violent crime is happening, including shootings of two-year-olds and lethal beatings of 75-year-olds. Just as during the Obama years, the discussion of the allegedly oppressive police is being conducted in the complete absence of any recognition of street crime and the breakdown of the black family that drives it.

Once the violence began, any effort to “understand” it should have stopped, since that understanding is inevitably exculpatory. The looters are not grieving over the stomach-churning arrest and death of George Floyd; they are having the time of their lives. You don’t protest or mourn a victim by stealing oxycontin, electronics, jewelry, and sneakers...
RTWT.

Thursday, May 28, 2020

Economic Relief Programs Will Soon End, and Then Watch Out for the Coming Political Earthquake

This is interesting, and it's almost exactly what I've been thinking since the lockdown started in March.

Even before classes ended and we went to online instruction --- for about a week --- I was starting my sections everyday with the Wall Street Journal on the overhead projector, showing the huge front-page charts of the crash of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. It was shocking at the time, and I told my students it was reminiscent of the Great Depression.

While the Crash of '20 is different, it's certainly going to bring about some fundamental changes in politics, and frankly I don't think Trump is a shoo-in for reelection, no matter how bad Biden is. That said, if leftists keep burning down cities all summer long, Trump can run on an aggressive "law and order" platform, highlighting racial issues, as he's did with illegal immigration in 2016 to victorious effect.

At WSJ, "The Covid Political Earthquake":

The political press is preoccupied with the electoral implications of the virus crisis, and pundits insist the 2020 election will be about the Trump daily soap opera. But an emerging cultural and economic time bomb is about to explode. There has never been a wider gap between average Americans’ perception of their own economic situation and the reality of it. America could soon have its most combustible political environment in recent history.

Something that should alarm everyone: Neither the stock market nor the political preferences of those who have been hit hardest by this Covid-induced economic crisis have fundamentally changed since the crisis began. The American economy has shed more than 30 million jobs in the past eight weeks, and poll numbers haven’t moved an inch. According to Gallup, President Trump’s approval rating was 49% on Feb. 16, with 48% disapproving. Three months and the largest job loss in American history later, those numbers are exactly the same: 49% to 48%.

How is that possible? Is the political climate so partisan that the loss of your livelihood can’t change your political perspective? To some extent that could be true. But most of America is living in an illusion that masks the inevitable pain of this pandemic.

To the credit of the president and Congress, the Cares Act was passed before many Americans missed paychecks. The administration distributed the cash quickly enough that Americans had access to expanded unemployment compensation and a direct payment before their financial situation became dire. For the 40% of people making under $40,000 who have lost their jobs since March, according to Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, the Cares Act ensured that their financial situation isn’t worse than it was in February. In some cases, it’s better, thanks to the $600-a-week unemployment bonus.

Much of economically vulnerable America has been insulated from economic reality. A recent Washington Post poll shows that 77% of those who lost their jobs believe they will be heading back to the same jobs following the health crisis. Pew Research reports that 68% of Americans who lost their jobs are concerned about reopening the economy too early, rather than too late.

In short, if your family hasn’t lost a loved one to Covid-19, your bank account probably looks basically the same, and you believe your job is awaiting your return, the past 10 weeks have been an extended inconvenience. Your political views are still informed by the same economic inputs that formed them in February.
Still more.