Pagans Don't Make Practical Plans

... other than rushing off to sacrifice more goats to Demeter because the rains didn't come.

Today, I'm going to do something I will regret later - slightly disagree with Don Surber and Bookworm from Bookworm Room. Both linked to me and I'm repaying them with a scratch on the leg because that's the kind of cat I am.

Don suggested the Democrats have a plan.

Democrats have planned this BLM rioting for a long time, and have actually held test runs in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore. Apparently, they are satisfied with their finished product.

But the breaking of windows has been going on for some time. First, Democrat mayors and the like stop enforcing drug laws. Then they make it OK to pee in the street. In California, the state government stopped enforcing shoplifting laws. Los Angeles started allowing hobos to put up pup tents.

This is the Democrat plan for America.

Bookworm went further.

This isn’t just a case of Democrat politicians paving the way for their violent footsoldiers by making the conditions easy for a breakdown in law and order. Instead, across America, Democrat politicians are doing something new: They are inciting the masses to break the windows. We aren’t witnessing an oppressed people rise up against a totalitarian politician class. We are, instead, seeing a political class that has its hands on some levers of power, using the mob against those people who still cling to the rule of law and their increasingly limited freedoms.

I disagree. There is no plan. 

Mandatory Alibi

Let's get the compulsories out of the way with an excerpt from this post wherein I suggest a single metric to determine the health of America.

I propose that we Americans work to improve a single metric: Black high school English language proficiency test scores. That's it. Forget GDP, forget the debt, forget crime rates, forget birth rates, forget illegitimacy. Forget all of it. Black high school English language proficiency test scores are the key. Dig these charts from this data source

Michigan high school English language proficiency in 2017.

If you love someone, you don't want to see their children grow up illiterate.

OK, on with the show.

The Pagans Sacrifice Their Goats

Like sacrificing goats to Demeter, the riots and demonstrations are an act of paganism - they are useless appeals to things that don't exist. That much was instantly obvious when no one rallied on the side of the Minneapolis cop what killed George Floyd. If there's only one side in a shouting match, you're not having a heated argument, you're having a mental breakdown like a schizophrenic drug addict screaming at the sky.

While people marched and held signs and knelt and begged for forgiveness, I wondered what we'd do 6 months from now when it all happened again. There is no Demeter and all we did was kill some goats. What's our encore, throwing virgins into volcanoes? Nothing changed because the underlying culture didn't change. There are no more intact, traditional families now than there were before. Without them, civilization crumbles.

Race is meaningless. Racism is irrelevant. You can tell this when you look at the demographics of the most dangerous cities in America. The worst place to grow up black is a city where there is no chance of "systemic racism" because the systemic racists aren't around.

What we're seeing is a manic, pagan spasm with all of the attendant logic, forethought, planning and strategy, which is to say absolutely none. The rains didn't come, so we rounded up all our herds and burned a 30' high pyramid of dead goats.

The Key Question For Don And Bookworm

Now what? If the Democrats had a plan, they'd have gamed out the current scenario. They clearly did not. They are only now beginning to realize what they've done. 

While the city council in deep, deep blue Minneapolis is still voting to defund the police, the ultra-hip boy mayor is beginning to freak out at scenes like this.

A recent gunfight in the streets of Minneapolis.

Exact date, location and source are unknown. pic.twitter.com/AHhALuW1BV

— Kyle Hooten (@KyleHooten2) June 27, 2020

You can tell there's never been a plan because things are starting to go sideways for the Democrat establishment, particularly the mayors and governors.

(T)hey actually have to do something real - maintain a vaguely-functioning society in their blue cities. While the media and the rest have no stake in whether or not Taniqua can walk to a CVS for her prescriptions, living in the untouched suburbs as they do, the Ds do have a stake in it.

Further, even they have to understand, at some dim level, that they can't do this without a police force to maintain some amount of order. Oh, sure, you can pull the cops out of black neighborhoods and close your eyes as the murder rates skyrocket, but you still need stores with stuff in order for your citizens to survive.

This is only the beginning and it's why the polls mean nothing right now. The landscape will be very different in about two months. 

If you're at all competent and productive, you'd have to be a total idiot to stay in Minneapolis, Chicago, Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles, New York and a half dozen other progressive cities. There's a part in that (Chicago aldermen and mayor) phone call where one of the aldermen muses about what will happen when the wild young men make their way into the residential neighborhoods where lots of people are armed. He's concerned that people will be shot. Yes, they might be shot today, but tomorrow, they'll find "For Sale" signs on the front lawns.

It's all dramatic and macho to talk about defending your home and family with guns, but it's not how anyone wants to live. You work all day to pay your mortgage and support your family. When you come home, there's a list of honeydos you have to tackle. The weekends are spent attending youth sporting events and fixing things around the house. Who wants to do all that and have to lay in bed at night waiting for noises that mean you need to grab your Glock and defend your home? Why not just move to a place where there aren't so many fatherless young men?

Previously, I said the Democrats were falling off the tiger, but stay with me because the payoff to this interminable self-indulgent prose comes after this ego-stroking blog excerpt.

The Democrat leaders are tasked with managing this population while our news media, education system and entertainment industry do their best to keep them enraged about phantom discrimination. At the same time, the cops are bailing, the cities are damaged, rebuilding prospects are dimming and their tax revenues have dried up thanks to their own draconian lockdown policy responses to the Wuhan Flu.

IMHO, the Summer of Anger is just beginning in the blue cities. They're falling off the tiger and are going to be eaten.

Tiger? What Tiger? 

The worst part is not that the Democratic establishment is falling off the tiger, it's that they didn't know they were riding one in the first place. These people are legitimate pagans. All of them. The press, the academy, Hollywood, all of them. All you need do is look at the crime and education stats for a moment and you can tell that race is meaningless and family structure is everything. You'd have to be a religious nut to cling to the race narrative. They are nuts and that's why their solutions don't work.

They have no plan because they don't have a functional model for the world. In their post-modernist rejection of logic and objective Truth, they deny that functional models even exist. You can't plan in an environment like that, you can only sacrifice goats.

Dead goats don't help kids learn how to read. There's a price for that which we are all paying now.

Bonus Tidbit

H/T: Melissa Tate put this thought in my head with this video.

Two black women make a plea to white people to stop apologizing for being white & bowing down to black people in #whiteguilt propaganda being promoted by the liberal machine.

“Stop it! It’s sick, it’s DEMONIC” pic.twitter.com/LMkcqj7YFj

— Melissa Tate (@TheRightMelissa) June 5, 2020

I Am So Over The Left's Purity Tests

After the Atlanta cop got charged with murder for taking out the dude what beat him down and then tased him, I stopped caring. With this, I am legit exhausted.

JK Rowling has deleted a tweet expressing her love of fellow author Stephen King, after he confirmed that he supports trans women.

There's an ever-changing, ever-lengthening list of left-wing positions you need to hold in order to be considered acceptable. It used to be funny watching them use it to eat each other, but this one did it for me. It's not fun any more. It's beyond tiresome. I saw this movie in college, decades ago, watching prog-commie academics argue with each other over how many proletarians could dance on the head of a pin. Stephen and JK - it's been done, guys. Please, move on to something else.

Here's something much better. It's a house finch taking a drink at our bird bath, shot with my new Nikon D3500 Artillery Piece. I left the image quite large, so I think it's worth a click. Enjoy!

Purple With A New Camera

With wife kitteh's blessing, I broke down and bought a Nikon D3500 yesterday. I got the package with two lenses, one of which is an excellent telephoto lens. We went hiking in the afternoon, so I brought it along and took some shots. They were wonderful, although the subject matter was a bit vanilla. The camera behaves and feels like my old D60 Artillery Piece, but the sensor, the lenses and the processing are much, much better. You'd expect those improvements after a dozen years of development. The D60 was that old.

The sky was too overcast to try some moonshots last night, so I'll just share a macro photo with you of a purple thistle. I left the image huge so you could check out the detail. Despite that, this is still not full-sized. I shrank it about 30% to get to this point. The camera is that fine.

Enjoy!

You might need to right-click, open-in-new-tab to see the full-sized version.

The Moon Is Meh

Last night, after some dinner guests left once they'd contracted the Wuhan Flu from us, I went outside and tried some moon photography with both the aging Nikon D60 Artillery Piece and the Fujifilm X-T10. It was meh.

My best shot came from the Fuji. Meh.

First, I was right about the Nikon. It is dying. It was unable to produce focused shots with the telephoto lens, even on manual mode, allegedly focused at infinity. It's developing other quirks having to do with the menu and settings as well. The error it threw during our recent night sky photography session was due to the autofocus feature, but disabling that did no good. I could take shots, but they were all blurry.

Sadly, that leaves me with the Fuji, a fussy, complicated, ergonomic disasterpiece of a camera. It gets good shots, once you wrestle it to the ground like a stubborn child with an unauthorized candy bar. 

I think it's time to get a new camera. The local shop has the latest Nikon consumer-level one on sale with the two-lens package. It's a pretty nice system. I'm debating whether or not I want to move to Canon as they have the best macro lenses and I do enjoy the odd flower, insect or lizard photoshoot. Oh well. No rush as the Fuji will work for now.

Finally, my post yesterday about being able to shoot night sky objects from the comfort of a home, mobile or fixed, was spot on. My first moon shots were totally blown out as I was using the settings for a moonless night sky. I ended up sitting in front of this desktop PC, looking up moon photography shutter speeds and apertures. They were way different than Milky Way shots. In the end, this photo was taken at 1/60 seconds with an aperture of 11 and ISO 200. 

Being able to go back and forth from a lit room with a good computer to the dark outdoors was key to learning. I should have done that long ago, before I started these experiments. You can't learn much if your lab notebook and texts are 90 minutes away from your laboratory. 

I'm much more familiar with the Fuji now and more comfortable with night photography in general. Wife kitteh is going on a girls' vacation in a few weeks. I'll use that opportunity for a longer cruise into the desert to get some real Milky Way shots, assuming the moon cooperates and isn't up the whole night.

RVs, Mortars And Moonshots

I've decided that the best way to do star photography is from an RV. Think about it. You go to some dark, remote location, set up your tripod, put on your cheaters so your old eyes can read the camera settings and then take some shots while you freeze to death because you forgot to bring a jacket. When you're done, you have no idea whether the pictures are any good because you can't see them on the camera's tiny screen.

No, that's no way to do it. If you had an RV, you'd saunter inside, put the memory card in your laptop, fire up Photoshop and see if you got what you wanted. Using your phone as a hotspot, you'd check the Internet to see when the Milky Way would be visible because you forgot that, too.

Also, if you had an RV, driving 3 hours to get to a darkness class 2, average dark sky, spot wouldn't be a big deal. You could pull over in a parking lot, get some shuteye and then roll home the next morning after stopping at a diner for waffles, sausages and coffee.

Yeah, that's the way I'd do it. If I had an RV. Which I don't. Instead, I'm going to take some experimental pictures of the moon from home tonight, where it's darkness class 6, bright suburban. At least it ought to help me figure out why my Nikon Artillery Piece was throwing an error when we were up at Mount Laguna.

I'm guessing my photography won't look nearly as good as this.

Today's Riot Wrapup

As for mortars, dig this piece on the continuing insurrection in Portland.

Protesters lit fires and looted and damaged businesses in North Portland early Friday morning, Portland Police Bureau said...

At around 10 p.m., police said several hundred people had gathered outside the precinct. The demonstrators arrived with supplies and began erecting a fence that stretched from the south side of the North Precinct to the north side of the Boys and Girls Club. While building the fence, police said the demonstrators blocked northbound traffic on Northeast Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

While this was happening, police said demonstrators began throwing items at officers, including glass bottles.

By 11 p.m., police said the demonstrators were moving dumpsters and other barriers around the precinct. Some began ramming dumpsters into garage doors on the west side of the North Precinct to try and get inside the building, police said. When they couldn't get the garage doors open, police said the demonstrators began barricading exit doors so officers and people in custody inside the building could not get out.

At 12 a.m., police said a demonstrator in the crowd began yelling over a bullhorn that they were "going to burn the building down." ...

Police said someone launched a mortar onto the roof of the North Precinct building at 1:40 a.m. and at that point, officers began using crowd control munitions.

At around 2:15 a.m., demonstrators had set the north side of the North Precinct on fire.

Emphasis mine.

You know, nothing says social justice quite like trying to murder the police by locking them in a building and setting it on fire. Well, I mean, mortar rounds say that, too, but you knew that.

Would the last Portland Police officer to leave the city turn out the lights in whatever is left of the Precinct building?

Reality Is Going To The Polls

While I sometimes hyperventilate on this blog about the Democrat-Nazi* insanity, in the back of my mind, I'm not all that worried. Yes, blue cities are being wrecked, but in the end, Reality will get it's vote and it's the only vote that counts. That vote will come in stages.

Stage 1 is where the cops leave black neighborhoods. Stage 2 is where those neighborhoods turn into abbatoirs while the news media ignores them because rrrrrrrrrrracism!** Stage 3 is where it gets so bad that no one can ignore it. Stage 4 is where we realize that the problem wasn't racism after all, it was the destruction of the family. 

Maybe we get to Stage 4, maybe we stop at Stage 3 and come to a different conclusion. Either way, it's going to get harder and harder to sell the fake noose stories as we watch the black bodies pile up in black neighborhoods at the hands of black criminals. We really do care about them and we really aren't racist. It's going to be very painful to see. The only question is when we start being shown it.

So here we are at Stage 1. Don't believe me? Dig these data points.

• In Atlanta, traffic stops are down 80%. No big deal? Total arrests are down 71%. The cops have walked off the job while still getting paid.
• Chicago set a record for shootings last weekend. The middle of the week hasn't been much of an improvement.
• Minneapolis had at least 1600 gunshots in the last 30 days, almost all of which came from the black neighborhoods.
• In Tampa, cops were ambushed by a black mob when they responded to a call about a shooting in a black neighborhood.
• New York City shootings have doubled since the anti-police riots began.
• In Portland, the police allowed an anti-cop mob to lock them in one of their precinct houses. They didn't come out to defend it, but cowered inside.
• In Seattle ... whatever. That place is hopeless.
• Update: In Milwaukee, a mob attacked the police and firemen as they responded to a case of missing teenage girls. All I can say is that it's time we defunded the fire department!

I found these with quick Google searches. There are tons more. In blue cities across the nation, the cops are making rational, informed decisions and allowing the residents of certain neighborhoods free reign. Since there are almost no traditional, nuclear families in those neighborhoods, civilization has broken down there, just like we social conservatives have warned for decades.

This is a massive, blue civil war where the wealthy, protected progressives live in their bubble and spout modern Nazi Race Theory rubbish while the poor, black people suffer from the massive increases in violence. That cognitive dissonance can't go on forever. At some point, the progs will have lost too many supporters as compassion overcomes ideology. That will be Stage 3.

Let's hope we get to Stage 4. Soon.

Dads matter. A lot.

* - Short description: Take Mein Kampf and change Jew to White and German to Black and you end up with a series of Elizabeth Warren / Kamala Harris / Random Democrat speeches.

** - I've fallen in love with the way Ben Shapiro trills the r in racism. I think it's hilarious.

KT's Rule Of Noose Incidents

... is very simple.

If the person alleging the hate crime claims a noose was involved, it's a hoax.

Add Bubba Smollett, or whatever his name is, to the list. This black BLM activist who moonlights as a lousy NASCAR driver decided to slander the South in general and NASCAR fans in particular with the perfectly predictable charge of Rrrrrrrrrrrrrracism!

I've grown to love the way Ben Shapiro trills the initial r on the word. It makes me laugh every time.

Anyway, getting back to the subject at hand, who uses a noose to make a threat? Who even knows how to tie one of the things? Why would you carry one around with you when having it found on your person who subject you to all manner of risks? It's madness. If you're going to commit an anti-black hate crime, you'd be much more likely to do it with a Sharpie or some spray paint. Heck, even the spray paint is too risky. I'd stick with a Sharpie.

If you're not familiar with the story, Bubba said a noose was found in his garage at the NASCAR racetrack in Talladega, Alabama. The press did it's part and howled about Southern racism. No photo of the alleged "noose" was shown. In a sign of solidarity with NASCAR's only black driver, all of the drivers and pit crews of all of the other teams pushed Bubba's car around the track. #IStandWithBubba was marked in huge letter on the grass. NASCAR management made sure everyone knew they were going to make the racist villains pay. The FBI sent in no fewer than 15 agents to investigate.

It was a garage door pull. It's looped to make it easier to, you know, like, pull down the freaking garage door. It's on every door of every garage at the speedway. They've been there for years. The loops are small. The only person you could hang with one, assuming it was a slip knot, which it isn't, would be G. I. Joe.

It's a loop in a garage door pull rope.

My favorite meme of the incident. Bubba likes to wear an "I Can't Breathe" t-shirt because activism is his primary job.

The best tweet of the brouhaha came from Matt Walsh.

NASCAR made this video because a grown man was afraid of his garage door

pic.twitter.com/ngV42lvmDH

— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) June 24, 2020

In completely unrelated news that can't have anything to do with the police bailing out of black neighborhoods because racist loons like Bubba and his enablers in the press push racial paranoia, there have been 1600 shots fired in Minneapolis in the past 30 days. Their locations trace out two neighborhoods. Three guesses as to whose neighborhoods those are and the first two don't count.

Black Lives Matter is a completely noble and righteous organization that cares deeply for the safety and success of all black people. They are not an amoral, predatory group of race-hustling, Nazi-like goons.

Milky Way Photography

On Sunday night, wife kitteh and I went to Mount Laguna to do some more night sky photography. As usual, you had no idea if you were getting good shots or not because it all looked like dark squares with tiny, white dots on the camera's view screen. Yesterday, I brought the pictures into Photoshop, made some adjustments and Voila! Not only did they look pretty good, but the Milky Way is visible in some of them.

This is the best of the lot. I left it rather large, so it's worth a click. Enjoy!

The Font Was Too Small

That's the only thing I can think of when I look at the player names on the EPL jerseys from the games this weekend and then look at the crime stats in Chicago and New York City.

It could also be that not everyone marched or changed their Facebook avatars to black squares. It's hard to tell. We need Science to point the way here.

In Chicago, there were 14 killed and 95 wounded over the weekend, compared with 6 killed and 17 wounded last year. In New York, it went from 12 shot last year to 38 this year.

Another Possibility

Given the extent of systemic racism in America, we might be seeing spikes in violence because we're not tough enough on cops. We might need more of this.

Investigators are looking for the person who hung a mannequin dressed like a police officer from an overpass in Jacksonville, Florida.

Either way, it's important we all do our parts. I highly recommend changing all avatars, using as many hashtags as possible and committing as many anti-police acts as you can. Remember, silence is violence and brother, is there a lot of violence right now. 

Broken Mental Models

Ted Anthony, a patient, kind-hearted and highly proficient AP writer, made the mistake of asking me a question.

That’s a really interesting statement. Can you elaborate?

— Ted Anthony (@anthonyted) June 20, 2020

To borrow from G. K. Chesterton, it's probably a bad idea to ask for clarification from someone only too ready to write blog posts on the slightest provocation, but Ted did it and now I must respond.

Here's a data point that I feel is instructive. If the embedded video is fussy, here's the direct link to it.

There was a better one from Tucker's Friday show that I can't find online, so I will summarize it. A business owner in Charleston, SC, had his shop attacked by Black Lives Matter rioters while his staff and customers were still in it. Calling 911 accomplished nothing. The people managed to escape out the back, but his shop was destroyed.

In the name of Social Justice, left wing political leaders knowingly chose the left wing mobs over the shop owners. There are mountains of problems with their mental models, but I'll pick three of them for this post.

Ragged Red Rules

Why do you have police? Police exist to enforce the law. How do you get laws? Laws are enacted by the democratically elected legislature, signed by the executive and interpreted by the courts. Remove the police, either through defunding, withdrawal for racial reasons or simply stop responding to 911 calls and you have no laws. Without enforcement, the laws become words on paper.

If you've invested your life in a fixed asset like a shop or a factory and the police vanish, what's left to you other than arming yourself and your employees and enforcing your own laws? How many people know the rules regarding defense of life, home or business? Remove the police and you'll end up with 100 heavily armed shop owners interpreting the laws on the spot. The results will be mixed, to say the least. Mixed with a lot of blood.

The left has no model for this. When I watch interviews with store owners who have been burned out by the left's own BLM / ANTIFA crowd, the end result is blindingly obvious. Either the merchants are going to leave or they're going to arm themselves. The blue cities are in this position because they lacked the mental framework to predict this. That shines out as clear as day when you listen to the Chicago aldermen talk to their mayor during the riots.

Gratuitous paragraph: Part of the broken mental model of the left is the source of wealth. All wealth comes from people engaged in private commerce. The government gets its money by taxing said private commerce. That's it. There is no other source. Progressives think money comes from the government and are regularly shocked at what happens when businesses leave. That's part of why they don't protect them. They don't understand the owners and they don't understand their value to the community.

Countering Violence With Retreat

The recent destruction of monuments in San Francisco are the perfect example of this broken mental model. It's indescribably delicious because the final monument whacked was one for Ulysses S. Grant. Dig this.

And Francis Scott Key is down, *right* as a police officer says “you’ve made your point, we’re not gonna let you pull this statue down,” with the crowd cheering and shouting “next one!” pic.twitter.com/8sbjmhMRXf

— Joe Rivano Barros (@jrivanob) June 20, 2020

Oh, so they're not going to let them tear down another statue, are they? And just how do they propose to stop the BLM / ANTIFA goons? Words. Talking. An open dialogue. It's all in the left wing mental model. If we just understand one another, if we try to get along with the other side, we'll find common ground and come to a mutually-beneficial agreement.

Grant came down directly afterwards.

The mob is willing to use violence. If you aren't, you'll lose. It's really simple and the mob can see it. At some point in time, you're going to have to bust heads and / or shoot people to stop this. Allowing it to continue is incredibly corrosive to society. Most people pulled over by the cops for a traffic violation are going to think of the rioters smashing and looting and see that there are two sets of rules. The BLM / ANTIFA mob gets to do what they want while you have to follow the law. Where does that lead?

Nothing Is Changing

In the end, it's the fundamental flaw in the left's mental model that makes all this pointless. The problem isn't race and it isn't racism, it's the loss of the traditional family. Dig these two data points.

Reading proficiency scores from South Senior High School in Minneapolis.

Reading proficiency scores from East High School in Cheyenne.

I didn't take the time to find more dramatic examples from Great Schools, but this tracks with the 60 or so schools I've sampled.

Here are two problems for the race-crazed among us.

1. If racism is such a huge problem, why are black kids doing better in ultra-white, Trump +40 Wyoming than in ultra-progressive, pluralistic Minneapolis? With nothing to slow down the redneck KKK there, wouldn't you expect the black children to be brutalized to the point of catatonia? How can they study with all that hate? It's almost like racism, particularly on the right, is not a big factor.
2. If blacks were inferior, why would they excel anywhere? They're doing it in Cheyenne. It's almost like race is irrelevant. Crazy!

The next time you want to wave racial data around, whether that's crime or education or income, take a look at family structure data as well and ask yourself which one seems to be a better indicator of performance. Spoiler: It's family structure.

That means the entire lefty worldview, the one that sounds like it came from a Mein Kampf madlib where the races are the blanks, is seriously flawed. The solutions we're pursuing will result in no changes unless they accidentally change marriage rates.

Summary

This is a stream-of-consciousness hobbyist blog and I'm tired of this post. I want to go have breakfast and then take the dogs for a run so I'm quitting here.

Oh, wait, that's not a summary. How about this one to answer the original question.

The Democrats own the education industry and outside of Fox and maybe the WSJ, they own the news media. Through those institutions, they taught our children that America is full of racism and hate and, as currently constructed, is illegitimate. We need to fundamentally transform it! That was great because it got the Democrats votes. Unfortunately, they went a bit too far and now the little monsters are telling the Democrats trying to manage the blue cities that America is full of racism and hate and is illegitimate. Burn it all down!

Lacking accurate mental models, the Democrat establishment can't cope with the violence and is about to get whacked upside the head by the fiscal repercussions while accomplishing nothing.

That's why they're in last place on the scoreboard.

This Is A Hot Democrat Civil War

When corporate Democrat think tank geniuses trade opinion pieces in the New York Times with radical Democrat academics, it's a cold war. When radical Democrat rioters burn and loot Democrat cities, it's a hot war. Similarly, when radical Democrat mobs vandalize public artwork in Democrat cities, it's also a hot war. If there is physical harm to people or things, the war is hot.

In a hot war, if the other side is willing to use more force than you, they win. It's that simple.

Last night, Democrat mobs tore down statues of St. Junipero Serra and Francis Scott Key in San Francisco. After they tore down Key, the police, acting as agents of the Democrat establishment, told the mob that the point had been made. The cops vowed that they would allow no more statues to be torn down.

And then, in what is easily the most delicious moment of this blue-on-blue civil war, the mob defied the police and tore down a statue of Ulysses S. Grant.

Yes, that U. S. Grant.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
(gasp)
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Just to make sure all of the establishment Democrats out there understand, if radical Democrats occupy portions of your cities, if they drive the cops from their precinct houses, if they attack your business owners, if they vandalize your buildings, then you are in the middle of a hot war. Hot wars aren't won with strongly-worded memos. You're going to need to use more force than they do.

Speaking of force, in Seattle, they have lots of guns. In Portland, who knows what they have. In San Francisco, they have syringes and loose bowels.

Good luck, Democrats.

It's Tough To Make Predictions, Especially About The Future

... so said that great philosopher, Yogi Berra.

Alternate Title: Ignore the polls. They're meaningless right now.

The madness is only starting and there's no telling where it's going to end, only that it's going to end very, very badly for Democratic leadership and average blacks. They're going to get killed, some of them literally.

Last night in Portland, ANTIFA vandalized and toppled a statue of George Washington. In the video below, the shrieks sound like the demons of hell.

In Boston, they're pondering removing a statue of Abraham Lincoln. In New York, it's Thomas Jefferson. How do you put a stop to this? It's not the nation's problem in general, it's the Democrat political leaders' problem. It's their cities, not all of ours.

In Atlanta, a racist DA is charging a white cop with murder in the death of a black criminal. There's no one in the country right now who doesn't know exactly why this happened and it has nothing to do with justice. We're not allowed to talk about it in public without reflexive shaming, but we all know what this was. Where is this going?

Whether the cops retire, quit or simply go limp on the job matters not a bit to the people in the high-crime neighborhoods. That would be the average, inner city black, in case you were wondering. It will take a month or two for the crime rates to spike, but they will and there won't be an end to it. How do you regain the trust of the police? Again, this is a problem for the Democrat political leaders, not the rest of us in general.

Finally, there's a heavily-armed pack of left wing loons occupying part of Seattle, pretending to be a sovereign nation. How's that going to end without tears and bloodshed?

Unfortunately, Trump is our president. He's got psychological problems such that he's just as interested in his personal cat fights as he is in our nation. It all adds up to crazy instability. Making predictions about where this all is going to go, particularly with regards to the November election, is madness right now.

The Return Of The Lynx

The Lynx Spider, that is.

There's been a pretty, little, green spider that's been hanging out on one of our cotton plants recently, but he's so shy that as soon as he feels vibrations, he darts underneath the leaves, making it impossible to photograph him. Yesterday, I went into the garden with my Nikon D60 Artillery Piece to shoot him. Creeping up carefully, I managed to get close without disturbing him and was rewarded with some nice photos.

Pretty cool, no?

Riots and Stuff - I need to take a break from that. The decision to charge the white cop in Atlanta with murder has accelerated the transformation of the blue cities. I'm thinking we'll end up with 3-6 more Detroits as competent people with portable skills move out. 

Wife kitteh will be taking a girls-only vacation soon and I was thinking about bolting for Dixie on a solo trip at the same time, but I think I want to see things calm down first.

Portland Points The Way!

I hadn't intended to do what follows and then I looked through the Portland Police Twitter feed. It's unintentionally hilarious. It reads like a high school wimp who is getting bullied and is trying to remain good-natured while begging for his backpack to be returned. Think George McFly and Biff in Back to the Future.

Yo, Portland Police! Remember, you gotta do my homework tonight!

As you read through these, ask yourself the following questions:

1. What kind of people would stay on the police force?
2. What kind of people would willingly join it?
3. What resident has any faith in their ability to protect him or her?
4. What happens if the "protesters" don't allow the fire trucks to pass unhindered? See also: My post on B-17s without fighter escort.

Ready? Here we go.

There is a fire near the 800 block of SW 3rd Avenue. We are advising the crowd to get out of the street so @PDXFire can respond. Please stop throwing projectiles at officers who are trying to assist with this operation.

— Portland Police (@PortlandPolice) June 16, 2020

Some demonstrators have locked the doors from the outside of the Justice Center and are lighting fires on 2nd Avenue. They are also tampering with the roll up doors of the Justice Center on 2nd Avenue. This is a life safety issue. Remove the items now!

— Portland Police (@PortlandPolice) June 17, 2020

Some individuals are tying cables and other items to the doors and fire hydrant. This presents a life safety issue for emergency ingress and egress.

— Portland Police (@PortlandPolice) June 17, 2020

The front door to Central Precinct was locked from the outside with the u-lock. It had to be cut off from the outside so those inside could leave. The rope was taken by protesters from the flag pole and tied to the roll-up doors on the Southeast corner of the building. pic.twitter.com/G97woNOh0j

— Portland Police (@PortlandPolice) June 17, 2020

OK, that's enough. It goes on forever. The replies to those tweets are exactly what they should be, filled with scorn and derision.

Exit Question: Since regaining permanent control of the city from the "protesters" will require a display of superior force, how and when will this happen?

Caracas, Georgia

... or, The Hand That Rocks The Cradle Holds The Badge.

Recalling my summary of a Wretchard The Cat tweet from the Venezuela blackouts, the electricity didn't stop because machines broke down, it stopped because the skilled people had left. It was skilled people, not machines that made electricity. They were the ones that kept the machines running.

It's not laws that make a civilized society, it's the enforcement of laws. If the cops leave or pull back, enforcement of laws will stop. After that, it's a civilizational blackout.

What wife is going to want her white, cop husband going back out on the beat when he can't defend himself from massive, intoxicated, black criminals resisting arrest and then firing a taser at him? I don't know about you, but I've done my share of martial arts and I am here to tell you that in a no-holds-barred, bare-knuckled fight, if you get tased, you're dead. I mean D-E-A-D dead. You fall to the ground, immobilized, even for three seconds, and you'll get an NFL kickoff kick to the head. Goodnight.

Similarly, there's a rumor that three NYPD cops were poisoned while eating at a Shake Shack. It doesn't matter whether the story is true or not. All that matters is the fear and doubt it puts in the mind of Mrs. Cop. Mr. Cop, too, but it's wife kitteh's constant worries that will make his life unbearable. Given the level of crazed hatred that has been generated by the media and our schools, a story about cops being poisoned wasn't at all surprising.

Now take a look at where the problems are and their political leanings.

City	State
Minneapolis	Minnesota
Seattle	Washington
Chicago	Illinois
NYC	New York
Los Angeles	California
Atlanta	Georgia

Hmm. I wonder if there's some kind of trend here. Hey, maybe if I were a cop's wife, I'd suggest moving to a red city in a red state! That just might work.

To repeat myself, the Democrats' political leaders are falling off the tiger. They have to provide some level of city functionality for their voters. Without the cops, that's impossible. If their cities decay into chaos, making a national case is going to be very difficult.

Finally, there is the distinct possibility that the descent into chaos will finally cost them a big chunk of the black vote. If that happens, and we should all pray to God that it does, they're well and truly hosed.

Now dig this.

Quick reminder for when they tell you destroying property isn’t violence. pic.twitter.com/Sni5iGxVRy

— Dave Rubin (@RubinReport) June 15, 2020

The Democrats Are Falling Off The Tiger

They key to tiger riding? Don't fall off.

The progressives in the media, our universities and entertainment have force-fed racial paranoia to us for decades and it's coming to a head. With nothing to show for decades of misrule and pandering, the Democratic Party, particularly its leaders, are about to fall off the tiger.

Cops are quitting and the remaining ones are demoralized.

At least seven Minneapolis police officers have resigned from the department since widespread unrest began over the death of George Floyd last month, and more than half a dozen are in the process of leaving, according to department officials.

The departures, an unusually large exodus, come amid a growing crisis for the state’s largest police force, with a state human rights investigation underway, calls for defunding, and even disbandment.

Morale has sunk to new lows in recent weeks, say department insiders, as officers reported feeling misunderstood and squeezed by all sides: by the state probe; by protesters, who hurled bricks and epithets their way; by city leaders, who surrendered a police station that later burned on national television, and by the media. Numerous officers and protesters were injured the rioting.

Without police protection, most of the businesses that were burned down aren't going to return. 

None of the riots will solve the problem because the problem they seek to solve doesn't exist.

During that same year, Minnesota Police shot and killed 9 people, 7 of which were white, 2 of which were black. All had guns, knives or other weapons. (Source: Washington Post Fatal Force Analysis Database, 2018)

— StoicMatthew (@stoicmatthew) June 5, 2020

Instead, a very different problem exists and has eaten out the core of black culture. There are almost no intact, traditional families in their neighborhoods. The result is near total ignorance and illiteracy.

Democratic-controlled cities have the poorest-quality public education despite their large, and growing, school budgets. Consider Baltimore, Maryland. In 2016, in 13 of Baltimore’s 39 high schools, not a single student scored proficient on the state’s math exam. In six other high schools, only 1% tested proficient in math. Only 15% of Baltimore students passed the state’s English test. That same year in Philadelphia only 19% of eighth-graders scored proficient in math, and 16% were proficient in reading. In Detroit, only 4% of its eighth-graders scored proficient in math, and 7% were proficient in reading. It’s the same story of academic disaster in other cities run by Democrats.

The Democrat leaders are tasked with managing this population while our news media, education system and entertainment industry do their best to keep them enraged about phantom discrimination. At the same time, the cops are bailing, the cities are damaged, rebuilding prospects are dimming and their tax revenues have dried up thanks to their own draconian lockdown policy responses to the Wuhan Flu.

IMHO, the Summer of Anger is just beginning in the blue cities. They're falling off the tiger and are going to be eaten.

On Statues

By all rights, if we're going to take down statues, they ought to be done in reverse chronological order since the more recent racists have less of an excuse than the ones in our past. Robert Byrd, former KKK Exalted Cyclops, ought to be first on the chopping block.

But it's not about racism, is it? It's about votes and power. It's the Democrat media, the Democrat education industry and the Party itself doing its best to keep racial paranoia strong. They're hoping their lock on black votes lasts one more election so they continue to feed the tiger they're riding.

There are months between now and the election. Given the speed and ferocity of developments, a lot is going to happen between now and then. To me, it looks like they're starting to slip off their seat on the tiger.

Breaking: The Wendy’s that rioters set on fire during protests in Atlanta, Georgia, in now engulfed in flames. Tensions between protesters and police are continuing to rise at this hour. pic.twitter.com/sapYGncN9v

— PM Breaking News (@PMBreakingNews) June 14, 2020

A drunk dude got shot when he stole a cop's taser and pointed it at him. Now we've got riots again. The abuse of police will only stop when the Democrat media and political leaders decided it will. As their relationship deteriorates, so will all kinds of other things.

1. Property values decrease in blue cities as people try to get out
2. Insurance rates increase with instability
3. City budgets fall as tax revenues decline after businesses are destroyed
4. Personal and property safety reduced as cops pull back into safe positions
5. Increased police resignations
6. Increased fire risks as fire departments can't respond in some neighborhoods without police escort

That last one might be the most interesting. Imagine what happens when a riot breaks out after a cop kills someone who is attacking firemen trying to do their job. That's not so far-fetched.

In any case, this is a full-on blue civil war. Let's see if the Democrat political leaders figure it out before the election. My bet is no. 

Hitting Your Head With A Hammer Matters

These days, I feel like we're ultra-indulgent parents of disturbed children.

"If mommy and daddy take down the bad statues, will you stop hitting yourself on the head with a hammer?"

Even that is too harsh because we're not asking the children to stop hitting themselves on the head with hammers. Dig this video of head hammering.

It's the Walmart in their own neighborhood. They're not stupid, they know this is where they shop. They know this is where some of them work. To deny their intellect or moral agency is, and I'm not kidding, racist. It's the very definition of racism to say that they don't possess the same mental faculties that you do.

They're hitting their own heads with hammers while we take down statues, rename military bases, abuse the police and grovel for forgiveness. Who does this? On what planet does any of this make sense? This isn't moral or thoughtful, this is simply cowering in fear, hoping to appease the mob so they'll leave us alone. No one outside of CNN viewers think that begging for mercy from the mob is going to lead to anything good.

If you think about it carefully, our response to the mob is the opposite of love. If you love someone, you hold them accountable for their actions. If you don't care whether they live or die, you smile and nod your head while they self-destruct right in front of you.

Or hit themselves on the head with hammers.

Bonus take: What's the over-under on police resignations in blue cities? Who's going to voluntarily stay when the public and your political leaders treat you like this?

Leah

After getting some smudgy, blurred photos from my elderly Nikon D60 Artillery Piece, I shelved it in favor of my newer Fuji camera. While attempting to photograph birds in my backyard, I discovered that the Fuji didn't have good telephoto capabilities. The Nikon had a telephoto lens that made distance shots a breeze, so I brought it back out and tested it.

The Artillery Piece is indeed declining with age. It will no longer autofocus with the telephoto lens at maximum magnification, but it still takes fine photos. It's back to being my favorite camera. I like the ergonomics of it much better than the Fuji which I find to be unnecessarily complicated.

While playing with the Nikon in the back yard, I got this photo of Leah, one of our chihuahua mixes. I think she's a gorgeous dog and the shot came out particularly well. I left it large so you can enjoy her elegant beauty.

The World's Smallest Grasshopper

I saw this little fellow on one of my cotton plants the other day and I've been photographing him with different cameras, trying to get a clear shot of him. He's about 1/3 the length of my thumb and even my Nikon D60 Artillery Piece in macro mode struggles to get a good photo.

He's stayed on the same plant the whole time, one of my red foliated cottons. That's fortunate because his light green shows up well against the maroon of the leaf.

I left the photos pretty big, so I think they're worth a click. Enjoy!

This is the best shot I've gotten to date. He's pretty crisp here. He's so small that the camera usually focuses on the background leaf and that's enough to make him blurry.

Here, you see him on the full leaf. Note that this is a young leaf, still only about 1/4 the size it will eventually reach. When I say this guy is tiny, I mean he's really tiny.

Farewell To Blue Cities

If you haven't heard the audio of Chicago's mayor talking to that city's aldermen, you need to give it a listen. I found it utterly riveting. I hadn't planned on listening to more that a few minutes of it, but I couldn't turn it off and listed to the whole hour plus. 

It was like tuning in to a German command circuit as the Russian Front was collapsing.

Ald. Pat Dowell (3rd Ward) said she felt helpless to protect older residents, who she said were struggling to buy food and get prescription medicine.

“I’ve worked really hard over the last seven years and now I feel like I am five feet back,” Dowell said.

“I feel like I am at ground zero,” Harris responded. “My major business district is shattered. Why would Walmart or CVS come back to our communities?”

Ald. Emma Mitts (37th) said her West Side ward was like “the wild, wild west out there.”

The major difference between the Wehrmacht commanders and the Chicago Democrats is that the Germans knew what was going on at both the strategic and the tactical level. Credit where it's due, the Democrats knew the tactical situation and, as shown above in their concern for businesses, had some clue about the strategic situation, but not a complete one.

The Democrats created this. They own it, lock stock and barrel. We social conservatives have been telling you this was going to happen and we were right all along. We were called intolerant, bigoted, close-minded, full of hate, but we were right all along. When we nuked the traditional family, we set this in motion and now we're nearing the end state.

I'll generalize here so people can accuse me of being a bigot. The rioters are illiterate and fatherless. They have never been taught a link between earning and having. Self-control is not a virtue with them. Finally, thanks to the progressives who have taken over our institutions, they are racial paranoids. This was all visible when we started our experiment in equating all family structures and now it's right in front of us, but the Democrat political leaders still can't see it.

When you listen to that call and hear the aldermen ask for more cops, more National Guard troops and talk about encouraging community organizers and church leaders to get out in the streets and calm the kids down, what you're really hearing is a desperate plea for father-replacements. "The kids are burning down the Walgreens! Since we don't have any dads, let's bring in the cops!"

They created the perfect breeding ground for violent, ignorant, illiterate, impulsive young men and now they're reaping the rewards.

Lightfoot said it took three hours for officers to clear the area near Madison Street and Pulaski Road, and even after officers “gassed [the crowd] with pepper spray twice, they didn’t give a s--t.”

Lightfoot said officers were in “armed combat” with those intent on committing crimes on the West Side only making progress after bringing in “heavy equipment and stronger pepper spray.”

Lightfoot said a crowd of 30-40 people gathered outside a clothing store near 111th Street and Michigan Avenue as a “dude with a sledgehammer” broke into the store to allow it to be looted.

“I don’t know about you, but I haven’t seen s--t like this before, not in Chicago,” Lightfoot said.

These boys were never disciplined growing up, so now they need more cops than exist in all of Illinois to protect their city. Like stabilizing the Eastern Front in 1944, it's an impossible task.

Where This Leads

If you're at all competent and productive, you'd have to be a total idiot to stay in Minneapolis, Chicago, Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles, New York and a half dozen other progressive cities. There's a part in that phone call where one of the aldermen muses about what will happen when the wild young men make their way into the residential neighborhoods where lots of people are armed. He's concerned that people will be shot. Yes, they might be shot today, but tomorrow, they'll find "For Sale" signs on the front lawns.

It's all dramatic and macho to talk about defending your home and family with guns, but it's not how anyone wants to live. You work all day to pay your mortgage and support your family. When you come home, there's a list of honeydos you have to tackle. The weekends are spent attending youth sporting events and fixing things around the house. Who wants to do all that and have to lay in bed at night waiting for noises that mean you need to grab your Glock and defend your home? Why not just move to a place where there aren't so many fatherless young men?

Venezuela taught us where this leads. Wretchard the Cat pointed out that the electricity didn't fail in Venezuela because the equipment broke down, it failed because the competent people left and then the equipment broke down. No one was left who knew how to fix things.

This is how deep blue California ended up the state with the worst income inequality. Competent, middle-class people have fled the state. The remaining population chiefly consists of the ultra-rich who can afford security and the ultra-poor who are the house pets of the rich progressives.

My man Tucker has been rightfully despairing of what's going on, but I would argue that this is self-correcting. In the end, reality gets a vote and on that phone call, you can hear reality voting as Chicago is burned by it's own, fatherless young men.

Blue Collar Logic breaks it down for you.

Your Post-Riot Scoreboard

The recent riots in Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Atlanta, New York, Los Angeles and so on were another battle in a 5-way, blue-on-blue civil war. Now that things have mostly calmed down, how did the teams fare? Here's my take on who won and who lost.

Winners

1. The media. Living in their protected suburbs, well-paid for reading teleprompters, the media came out the big winners. It's all about ratings, man, and riots are good for ratings. For CNN, MSNBC and all the people paid to bloviate as "experts," this was a massive victory. Outside of a few, intrepid souls who tried to report from the riots themselves, the media were warm and safe while they pushed their blue narratives. They coated themselves in smug, faux-virtue at no risk to themselves.
   
   
2. Black Lives Matter. Dude, was this a windfall or what? Heck, we've now got ignorant, little San Diego high school kids spending hours standing on our sidewalks holding promotional signs for BLM and no one has to pay them! Sure, BLM suffered a little downside as some people managed to get past the media's news blackout and saw BLM looting the blue cities, but all in all, this was a massive win at very small cost.
   
   
3. The Universities and ANTIFA. What a great day for postmodernism! Finally, a chance to spread their wings and fly. And then dive down on civilians like Luftwaffe JU-87 Stukas bombing and strafing refugees. It was everything they ever wanted and they took full advantage of it. Their allies in the media provided cover. While standing in front of burning buildings, the ANTIFA public affairs arm told us the protests were mostly peaceful.
   
   
4. Hollywood. The airheads in our entertainment industry were only peripheral to this one, but they managed to score a few points by supporting the rioters, pledging to bail out any of them that got arrested. It was a small gain, but they paid no price for it at all.

Losers

1. Democrat political leaders. These guys just got crushed. Unlike the four groups above, they actually have to do something real - maintain a vaguely-functioning society in their blue cities. While the media and the rest have no stake in whether or not Taniqua can walk to a CVS for her prescriptions, living in the untouched suburbs as they do, the Ds do have a stake in it.
   
   Further, even they have to understand, at some dim level, that they can't do this without a police force to maintain some amount of order. Oh, sure, you can pull the cops out of black neighborhoods and close your eyes as the murder rates skyrocket, but you still need stores with stuff in order for your citizens to survive.
   
   Not only did they take a massive beating from the riots and looting, but their future looks very dim. BLM is establishing a militia to fight the Ds' cops while the University loons are pushing to reduce the number of cops through their Defund the Police madness. That's hardly a recipe for stability. If you're CVS or Walmart, you'd have to have rocks in your head to return to your burned-out locations in the blue cities. Who will take the blame for that? The D political leaders. Way to go, guys. You forgot that if you decide to ride a tiger, you must never fall off.

Always Losers

1. Average black Americans. As always, normal blacks lost. This time, they lost enormously. See, they actually have to try to live in the ruins created by the five groups above. You know, like shopping and working and going to school and stuff. They started out without intact families and they ended up without them. Not only that, the riots and protests further cemented the idiotic notion that racism is the cause of their problems. The media now has what they love more than anything else, a way to push the racism narrative and drown out any calls for a return to traditional families. That's why the media scored the highest and normal blacks ended up where they always do in these blue civil wars, at the bottom.

Black Lives Matter, but normal blacks being able to shop does not.

A Simple Test For America

.. or really, a simple test result to measure how well America is doing. 

I propose that we Americans work to improve a single metric: Black high school English language proficiency test scores. That's it. Forget GDP, forget the debt, forget crime rates, forget birth rates, forget illegitimacy. Forget all of it. Black high school English language proficiency test scores are the key. Dig these charts from this data source.

Michigan high school English language proficiency in 2017 under white supremacist Trump.

Michigan high school English language proficiency in 2014 under Lightworker Obama.

I chose the Michigan data* because it came up first in my Google search and I'm lazy. 

Whether the Federal government is run by a racist like Trump or compassion-filled Obama, about half of the black students are effectively illiterate. They're doomed. If you can't read by the time you graduate from high school, you're going to have a bad life and you won't contribute much to society.

All of the marches and rioting and sign-waving and speeches and word-salad gibberish coming from the Aristocrats in our universities mean nothing if half of the population can't read and write. We're wasting our time and from the historical data, we've been wasting our time quite a while.

Why I Chose This Metric

Drive English language proficiency among blacks and you drive everything. 

First, there's no way to improve those stats without traditional families. Pay the teachers, blame racism, double the school staff, yell at the moms, blame racism some more and none of it changes until there's one parent doing the dishes while the other parent helps with the homework. That much is obvious from all of the available data across all races and all years.

Second, all we care about are black test scores because, for a variety of reasons that really don't matter, we've fetishized blacks. Everyone wants to be cool, so everyone wants to be black. The music, the attitudes, the hand gestures, the whole act, it's all cool and we want to be cool. If they're acing the English language test scores, we'll all do it.

Third, we're $25T in debt and we need everyone to pitch in and help the economy. If you can't read, you're a dead weight, dragging the rest of us down. Imagine where we'd be if black English language test scores were the same as white scores.

Go ahead, imagine it. I'll wait.

Finally, and most importantly, they are God's children and we're treating them like dirt right now. You know those progressives who scream at you about racism? Guess what? When they have to travel through all-black neighborhoods like Compton or South Side Chicago, they do what everyone else does. They roll up their windows, lock their doors and drive fast to get out of there as quickly as possible. Wanna know something else? The residents can't do that. So if you don't want to drive through there, imagine how it feels to live there. If you wouldn't want that for your children, you shouldn't accept it for anyone else.

I don't expect anyone to adopt this metric. We're having too much onanastic fun with our fight against racism. It's easier to tear down Robert E. Lee statues than it is to look into the reasons why blacks can't read and it feels oh-so-good to fight the Confederacy. After all, they don't shoot back any more. It's all pleasure and no work.

So there you have it. A simple metric we can all watch. Make of it what you will.

* - Don't ask me why they couldn't manage to present the data from the two years the same way. Suffice it to say that things have improved slightly under the white supremacist, but not enough to make a real difference.

America Is Fundamentally Racist Against Blacks

There. I said it and I mean it. Long time readers of the 'Post may worry that their heads will explode, but give me a chance to explain.

But first, let me throw one more bomb. Anti-black implicit bias is real.

Why did the death of meth-using George Floyd cause riots, but the death of retired cop and grandfather David Dorn did not? I've struggled with that ever since I saw the video of David being killed, which was fed live to Facebook by someone who filmed the episode, but did nothing to help David as he bled his life out on the sidewalk.

Someone in my family, let's call him Howard, is a complete and total scumbag. He's got a rap sheet, he's utterly amoral and he's spent his life taking advantage of everyone around him. If an atom of conscience crawled into his head, it would die of loneliness. If he got into an altercation with a cop and the cop killed him, even if it was out of malice and Howard was totally innocent, I guarantee you, we'd all shrug and say, "Good riddance. One less scumbag."

We are all aching to show how much we hate racism. Below is a photo from today's anti-racism protests in Philly. There are no counter-protests. None. There is only one side to this debate and everyone is on it.

Live look at Philly
pic.twitter.com/cMzwATbLT0

— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) June 6, 2020

There are probably hundreds of locales around the country where people are protesting the police. In my own, little burg, the local high school kids have been out on the main drag for days now, holding up Black Lives Matter signs. People drive by and honk and wave in support.

Why George Floyd and not David Dorn?

It's because we're racist. We're filled with implicit bias. I am dead serious, too. Candace Owens turned me on to the answer. Here's her video that enlightened me with the payoff starting at 1:05.

We're racists because to us, George Floyd is authentically black and David Dorn isn't. It took Candace's video and me thinking about family scumbag Howard to figure it out.

George died while high on meth and about to get in his car and drive. Because of that, we launched a Cat 5 racism freak out. If my Howard was high on meth and killed while just sitting on a park bench, we'd shrug. David Dorn was killed by seven black thugs and we really did shrug.

David Dorn.

David Dorn being shot.

The suspects in David Dorn's killing, video released by the St. Louis Police Department.

We're outraged at the death of George Floyd and not David Dorn because that's how we see blacks. We see them as criminals. That's our standard definition of them. It's not the pregnant, black woman that George Floyd robbed at gunpoint a few years back that makes us grab our banners and march, it's George, high on meth. The pregnant woman isn't really black to us. If she was shoplifting and cops roughed her up, then she'd be black. Sitting in her home, being all peacefully pregnant and stuff? Nah.

That's also why the 20+ deaths in Chicago last weekend don't bother us. The dead aren't black. Their killers are. That's why we want to reform the police. The police threaten the people we see as authentically black - the criminals.

Almost every time cops get called into a black neighborhood and arrest a black suspect it's because a black victim or black witness asked them to come. When one of these cases goes to trial, there are blacks on the juries and blacks in the witness stand. For the (probably black) witness who called the cops when George robbed the pregnant black woman, for the blacks in the jury, for the blacks working for the court, for the pregnant black woman herself, the cops were the solution. For the rest of us, frantic to show how we hate anti-black racism, the cops are the problem.

That's because we're racist. We see blacks as criminals.