There's a lot of reasons for the closure.
As one shopper explained, "'I mean, this was in the neighborhood, but look what happened. They stole a lot of stuff from there, ok? I don’t know. Just look around. So much stuff is happening here in Oakland, you know'," says Martha Stolaroff, who grew up in Oakland.
Watch:
That is the question.
At Quillette, "Should Critical Race Theory Be Banned in Public Schools? — a Conversation with Christopher F. Rufo."
At the Epoch Times, "CRT Opposition Grows Stronger, Bolder, and More Organized: ‘You Have to Fight Fire With Fire’":
Despite growing opposition to critical race theory (CRT) and a growing number of states passing laws to ostracize it from classrooms, edification and teachers’ cumulations are vowing to edify the controversial subject matter anyway. But one candid Florida mom verbalizes it’s time to “fight fire with fire.” “I cerebrate parents have realized you have to fight fire with fire,” Quisha King told the Epoch Times. You have to be as vigorous, as forceful, and as unrelenting as they are. King is the Florida mother who gained notoriety when she blasted the Duval County school board with vigorous opposition to CRT. In replication to the National Education Association’s threat to go after those who dared oppose CRT, King verbally expressed bring it on. In an effort to avail denizens fight back against the behemoth inculcation system, Tea Party Patriots Action (TPPA) is now distributing a 46-page booklet (pdf) edifying parents and students how to get organized in their effort to fight back. As described on its website, the United We Stand toolkit is a component of TPPA’s campaign to inspirit people to attend their local school board meetings to oppose CRT, and to urge a full return to in-classroom ordinant dictation. I cerebrate it’s good to avail parents understand how to apperceive (CRT) and how to detect it because they don’t genuinely understand how it’s being worked into the system, King verbalized. “It’s a great, handy guide so they’re armed with something.” “I cerebrate we require more things like that,” she integrated, verbally expressing she has additionally endeavored to avail parents by engendering informative videos. We embolden every parent and concerned denizen who cares about the future of our country to attend their local school board meeting, learn what is going on locally, and ascertain schools are plenarily open, TPPA Honorary Chairman Jenny Beth Martin verbally expressed in a verbalization regarding their incipient anti-CRT campaign. Teachers should be edifying reading, inditing, arithmetic, and history without indoctrination. I cerebrate there’s a sense of exigency with this because kids are in school for 12 years or 13 years if you include kindergarten, Martin explained to The Epoch Times. I don’t cerebrate it’s fair to wait just for the elections. We’ve got to understand what’s transpiring and work to unwind it at a policy level as well. “Obviously the first thing is to commence peregrinating to school board meetings,” Vero Beach, Florida, activist Susan Mehiel told The Epoch Times. The second thing is to commence electing school board members who are true to their word. According to Mehiel, people need to commence electing “non-edifying people on those boards,” rather than perpetually pulling from the same barrel of rotten apples. She additionally suggests people establish a good relationship with their local representatives. In June, Mehiel organized the “Save our Students” town hall meeting in Vero Beach to rally community members to verbalize out against proposed edification materials that pushed critical race theory in K-5 English Language curriculum. “If parents genuinely want to make a difference,” Mehiel exhorted, they have to have numbers and they have to have clout at the state level. At Moms for Liberty, we believe that it is essential for every denizen to amalgamate together to avail parents reclaim their rights in America’s public-school classrooms, Tiffany Justice, co-progenitor of Moms For Liberty told The Epoch Times. We applaud the work of organizations that give denizens resources and a roadmap for engagement with all levels of regime...
Good thing. *Phew.*
At the New York Times, "G.O.P. Blocks Infrastructure Debate in Senate, Raising Doubts About a Deal":
WASHINGTON — Republicans blocked the Senate on Wednesday from taking up an emerging bipartisan infrastructure plan, raising doubts about the fate of a major piece of President Biden’s agenda even as negotiators continued to seek a compromise. The failed vote underscored the intense mistrust between the two parties, which has complicated the effort to complete a deal. Both Republicans and Democrats in the group seeking a deal say they are still making progress toward agreement on a package with nearly $600 billion in new funds for roads, bridges, rail, transit and other infrastructure, which could be the first major infusion of federal public works spending since the 2009 stimulus law. Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, forced the vote in a bid to intensify pressure for a swift resolution to the talks, acting over the pleas of centrist Republicans who said they needed more time to solidify their deal with Democrats. With many Democrats harboring concerns that Republicans will drag out the process only to withhold support from a final bill, he argued that there was still time to iron out final details. “This vote is not a deadline to have every final detail worked out — it is not an attempt to jam anyone,” Mr. Schumer said before the vote, adding that negotiators would have “many opportunities” to add their plan to the bill “even if they need a few more days to finalize the language.” But Republicans said they were not ready to commit to considering an infrastructure measure, and warned that putting the matter to a vote risked scuttling a potential bipartisan breakthrough. On Wednesday, as they shuttled between meetings and votes, Republican negotiators said a final deal could emerge in the coming days, about a month after they first triumphantly announced agreement on a framework. “We’re optimistic that once we get past this vote today, that we’re going to continue our work and that we will be ready in the coming days,” said Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine and a key negotiator. She said members of the group “think that we will be largely ready on Monday.” With all 50 Republicans in the Senate opposed, Democrats fell short of the 60 votes that would have been needed to move forward with an infrastructure debate. All 50 members of the Democratic caucus initially voted to proceed, but Mr. Schumer switched his vote to enable him under Senate rules to bring up the measure again. It was an inauspicious beginning to what Democrats had hoped would be a period of intense activity on Capitol Hill, with action on a bipartisan infrastructure measure and a far more ambitious, $3.5 trillion partisan budget blueprint that would include money to address climate change, expand health care and education and broaden child care and paid leave. Instead, senators spent Wednesday voicing frustration over their failure to begin debating the infrastructure plan and privately meeting to work through the details of how to structure and finance the package...
Still more.
From Katie Pavlich, at Town Hall, "White House Communications Director Admits They’re Trying to Censor Conservative News Sites":
During an interview with CNN this week, White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield admitted the Biden administration's censorship efforts are specifically targeting conservative news sites for publishing "misinformation." "You've heard the president speak very aggressively about this. He understands this is an important piece of the ecosystem but its also the other thing, the president has pointed out and spoke to when he was asked about this yesterday, it is also the responsibility of the people creating the content and again I would go back to, there are conservative news outlets who are creating irresponsible content that's sharing misinformation about the virus," Bedingfield said...
RTWT.
PREVIOUSLY: "Jen Psaki's White House Disinformation."
Hilarious.
Call us next time you want to ride a wiener into space… pic.twitter.com/cmAnDeh6nS
— Oscar Mayer (@oscarmayer) July 21, 2021
At LAT, "Lebanon’s people line up in ‘queues of humiliation’ as their country unravels":
BEIRUT — Fill ’er up? Be ready to wait in line at least an hour — assuming the gas station is open, that is. Need medication? Something as basic as aspirin could set you on a daylong hunt from pharmacy to pharmacy. Even a grocery run is an ever-accelerating race against ballooning prices and a failing currency. And whatever you do, you’ll need to time it around power cuts that can last up to 23 hours a day. This is life in Lebanon these days, where a 21-month-long, government-engineered economic implosion — the World Bank calls it “a deliberate depression” — has transformed everyday tasks into a gantlet of fuel, power, water, medicine and basic goods shortages that residents dub tawabeer al-thul, or “queues of humiliation.” Those lines stretched long this week as the country geared up to celebrate Eid al-Adha, a festival during which Muslims sacrifice a sheep to commemorate Abraham almost sacrificing his son Ismail at God’s command. With the Lebanese lira’s street value down to less than 10% of its official value against the dollar, it’s a ritual few can afford. “Every month it’s getting worse, so long as the dollar [rate] gets worse,” said Abbass Ismail, a 37-year-old computer repairman trudging home from Beirut’s Sabra market on the eve of Eid. “This cost 100,000 lira,” he said, looking down at his four stuffed grocery bags. At the official exchange rate, that would have been $66. In reality, it’s about $4.50. Even then, “not everyone has this kind of money to spend. I don’t think there’s Eid. It’s only Eid for the haves.” It was little better across town in Hamra, an upscale neighborhood with a usually bustling shopping thoroughfare. “The days when people used to buy in large amounts, that’s gone,” said Sarah, an employee at a traditional sweets shop, who gave only her first name. The store had extended its hours to allow for Eid shoppers, she said, “but even if we stay open till 3 a.m., it won’t matter.” The international community spoke vaguely of corruption but continued to pour aid into Lebanon with little regard for how it was spent. Girding everything was a once-inviolable currency peg that kept the lira at 1,507.50 to the greenback. By 2019, after years of so-called financial engineering by Lebanon’s central bank — which tried to lure dollars from abroad with astronomical interest rates, in what critics likened to a Ponzi scheme — and a series of crises that constricted the flow of dollars into the country, the system crashed...
Still more.
The decline is a direct function of the coronavirus pandemic.
This is both interesting and sad.
At NYT, "U.S. Life Expectancy Plunged in 2020, Especially for Black and Hispanic Americans."
More here, "How the White Working Class Is Being Destroyed."
It's Patricia Mazzei, at the New York Times, "Some Florida Hospitals Have More Covid Patients Than Ever Before":
MIAMI — A month ago, the number of Covid-19 patients admitted at two University of Florida hospitals in Jacksonville was down to 14. Now more than 140 people are hospitalized with the coronavirus, a tenfold increase over five weeks — and the highest number of Covid-19 patients this system has seen during the pandemic. Debra Wells, 65, was among those admitted to one of the hospitals this month when what she thought was a cold grew worse and worse until she could not breathe. “I said, ‘Lord, I feel like I’m dying,’” she recalled. Like most of the patients who hospital officials say they are admitting in Jacksonville and other fast-filling medical facilities in pockets around the country, Ms. Wells was unvaccinated. She had worried, she said, that the shots were not safe. “I was misinformed,” Ms. Wells said this week, after a five-day hospital stay. “I wasn’t ready, and I was scared.” A national uptick in coronavirus cases has led, in sudden and concerning fashion, to a steep rise in hospitalizations in some spots around the country where people have been slower to get vaccinated, a predicament experts hoped might be avoided because the people contracting the infection tend to be younger and healthier. Nationally, hospitalizations remain relatively low, nowhere near earlier peaks of the pandemic. But in some regions with lagging vaccination rates and rising virus cases — such as northeastern Florida, southwestern Missouri and southern Nevada — the highly contagious Delta variant has flooded intensive care units and Covid-19 wards that, not long ago, had seen their patient counts shrink. Covid-19 hospitalizations are trending upward in 45 states. While levels remain well below previous peaks, health care centers in parts of the Midwest, West and South are strained. At the two hospitals in Jacksonville, the number of Covid-19 patients is higher than last summer, when the coronavirus slammed Florida, and higher than over the winter, when the virus surged to devastating levels across the nation. “It’s very frustrating,” said Dr. Leon L. Haley Jr., the chief executive of UF Health Jacksonville. “Each day we continue to go up. There’s no sense of when things are going to curtail themselves. People are stretched thin.” The situation is worrying across northeastern Florida...
Still more.
Ironically, she herself covers sexual harassment and other gender-based forms of discrimination.
Actually it's Ibram Henry Rogers, so I guess that's more authentic, considering his shtick.
Shoot, I'm surprised he doesn't wear a dashiki. *Shrug.*
At New York magazine, "How Anti-Racist Is Anti-Racism?":
Ibram X. Kendi’s work takes dead aim at those convenient fictions [of the mainstream interpretations of U.S. history]. The historian and pop-theoretician of “antiracism” seeks to disrupt white America’s complacency about racial progress by spotlighting Black-white disparities in incarceration, wealth, and other social ills. And he seeks to stigmatize victim-blaming accounts of Black social disadvantage by insisting that all racial disparities derive from a history of white supremacy (not a “culture of poverty”). Kendi is especially concerned with the way superficially non-racist ideas and policies can serve the function of fortifying racial hierarchy. His solution is to adopt a consequentialist definition of racism: A policy or idea is racist to the extent that it “produces or sustains racial inequity,” and antiracist to the extent that it reduces the same. Kendi’s ideas have both influenced and internalized broader intellectual currents on the social-justice left. And, collectively, antiracist thinkers and activists have had great success in reshaping mainstream discourse. Today, statistical testaments to racial inequity are a staple of Democratic oratory, while pathologizing calls for Black men to “pull up their pants” and raise their children are largely absent. Mainstream news outlets, meanwhile, rarely report on social problems without conveying pertinent racial disparities. And much of corporate America has invested resources into monitoring and mitigating racial gaps in pay, hiring, and promotions. All of which is to the good. Today’s discourse about race is surely more conducive to egalitarian reform than yesterday’s (better for the liberal media to fixate on racial disparities than “welfare queens”). Given that anti-Black discrimination in hiring remains prevalent in the U.S., corporations that feel compelled to diversify their workforces for brand reputation’s sake are preferable to ones that don’t. Further, one could reasonably argue that Kendi-esque antiracist advocacy has already facilitated meliorative changes in public policy. Had such advocates not heightened the salience of racial inequity among white liberals, debt relief for disadvantaged Black farmers might not have made it into The American Recovery Act. And it’s also plausible that antiracists’ stigmatization of “welfare queen” narratives enabled the Democratic Party’s recent embrace of unconditional cash assistance to low-income families; until this year’s CTC expansion, Democrats had designed their anti-poverty programs to leave out America’s poorest children so as to punish their parents for being unemployed, a convention that disproportionately harmed Black families. This said, the scale of reform necessary for eradicating Black disadvantage remains far beyond the bounds of political possibility. Enact Joe Biden’s entire agenda, and millions of African Americans will still lack affordable housing, remunerative employment, and health insurance. Meanwhile, an increasingly authoritarian far-right party controls a majority of U.S. states, and is well-positioned to retake Congress, if not full control of the federal government, within the next four years. Building the America that the Civil Rights Movement demanded — one that would guarantee economic security to all of its citizens — will require transforming our nation’s politics. Within blue America, there is much debate about whether the discourse of antiracism is conducive to such a transformation...
Looks like she's taking a personal liberties and responsibilities position, which I think is good.
But no doubt she'll be savaged in the national press for her pragmatic stance --- these media ghouls destroy people.
I wonder if this will have an effect on the Atlanta Braves, not to mention all the professional football teams and college and universities with Indian mascots.
Time will tell. I have a sense it's sooner or later.
An interesting story with lots of background on the origins of the change to the Cleveland Guardians.
At the Akron Beacon Journal, "How the Cleveland Indians became the Cleveland Guardians."
A fresh look from the 216. pic.twitter.com/0W8VTtZ7b0
— Cleveland Indians (@Indians) July 23, 2021
Eye want candy?
— Cleveland Indians (@Indians) July 23, 2021
Introducing the "Diamond C," "Guardians Fastball," and "Script Guardians." pic.twitter.com/VfF5pWwPf9
Following-up from yesterday, "Stumbling, Bumbling Joe Biden 'Town Hall' on CNN."
It's Laura Ingraham, at Fox News:
