... that's essentially what will happen if you defund or hamstring the police. Without police escorts, like P-51s escorting B-17s in WW II, firemen won't be safe responding to calls in bad parts of town. Think I'm kidding? Dig this.
The bomber crews didn't like going on missions without escorts. Neither will the firemen.
Los Angeles has already said it's going to cut the police budget by $100M to $150M. Mayor Breed of SF is planning to do something similar. The blue-on-blue civil war is moving on to its next phase.
Update: Seattle has banned the use of tear gas for the next 30 days. Tear gas is the cops' only option when they're outnumbered 10-1 or worse. With a little tactical planning and some intel, the ANTIFA and BLM goons could have a field day in deep blue Seattle.
All 57 members of the Buffalo police Emergency Response Team resigned in solidarity with the two officers who were suspended for pushing an old man, local law enforcement sources confirmed Friday.
Make the cops' job impossible and you'll end up having to do it yourself.
Once the kneeling and speeches are done, once the police budgets have been cut, once the apologies for white privilege are over, where will we be?
A year from now, what will have happened to marriage, crime, test scores and obesity? How about neighborhood stores? How were the riots anything other than a total disaster?
All of the posing and preening is nauseating, of course. It's annoying and prompts us to get angry on social media, but if you step back and think about it, nothing has really happened other than to gut blue cities. Mostly Nothing, a Minnesota resident, commented recently that he's less likely to shop in Minneapolis now. I'll bet a lot of people are thinking that same thing in lots of different cities.
How about places like NY? Now that we've tried out two months of teleworking, is there really a need to go back to Manhattan? Wouldn't it be nicer to live in western New York where the cost of living is lower and it's safe?
Finally, I'm convinced that a large percentage of shop owners are going to buy guns. The next time this happens, and it will happen again, we'll see fewer images of some guy futilely trying to protect his wife from a half dozen thugs with a board and more guys pulling out a Glock and blowing rioters away. Dittos for people trapped in cars as rioters smash their windows with hammers. I guarantee you, if that was me, I'd be more than willing to face charges to protect my family.
So while the politicians kneel and apologize and defund, more and more average Americans are going to arm themselves. Think about what that means for the next riot and ask yourself if this set accomplished anything that was originally intended.
The George Floyd thing is going to happen again. In a country of 330,000,000, there's no way it can't. The question is whether or not we'll go through another series of riots. They key to the question is the news media.
If their dominant narrative is that we Americans are racist, we're going to see cities burn all over again. If the dominant narrative is that we're pretty cool with the whole skin color thing, then the tragedy will be seen as an isolated incident and reporting will be local like it is for black-on-black murders.
Me, I thought the George Floyd killing was just some Minneapolis cop rando offing a Minneapolis black rando. For all I know, George was on meth and the cop knew it. Or maybe the cop was hyper-aggressive and liked to show alpha dominance over suspects. Or maybe he suffered from cop-PTSD and flipped out. Or maybe it was racial and the cop wanted to stomp on a black.
The news media knew. They knew it was symptomatic of our systemic racism, another example of America's 400 years of racial sins. They picked up the George Floyd ball and ran it into the end zone for a 6-burning-city scoop-and-score. Hooray for the news media! They're so wise and righteous!
So the question for us is: How can we earn the news media's approval? Each one of us needs to ask ourselves this question. Our primary goal from now until the next one of these needs to be to convince them that we're not racists. Everyone needs to pitch in and work our hardest.
Yesterday, here in San Diego, our local kids engaged in performance art, trying to show the media how anti-racist they were. They lined one of our main streets in my little burg, waving signs and chanting. I'm posting it here in the hopes that their valiant efforts will be noticed by reporters, editors and news anchors. Please, if you know any of them, forward this on to them. Like I said, this is all of our jobs now.
I know I'm dripping with angry, sarcastic, sneering, fake praise for the news media, but I'm not kidding about what is happening. Until they decide we're worthy, our cities will be burned and looted. Think about it. Why was the Minneapolis Mayhem a thing? Why wasn't it like the murder of Shanon Seward? The answer is that the news media weighed us in the balance and found us wanting.
We need to find an answer to this and soon, preferably before the next incident. Ask, plead, beg your local news media to tell you how we can at least get to the point were they deign to look upon us with only mild distaste instead of outright disgust.
Well, either that or we need to buy guns and ammo, especially if we live in blue cities. After this last week, if you get attacked by a mob and can't defend yourself, that's on you. Victimized by out-of-control rioting once, shame on you, victimized twice, shame on me.
Progressive Democrats have ruled over Minneapolis for about 50 years. That means they have hired, trained, managed and led two full generations of the police. One of the central, explicit goals of the progressives has been the elimination of racial injustice.
Progressive Democrats had all financial and HR power over the police. They could fire them, dock their pay, force them to take any amount of training, mandate therapy, and on and on. They had access to all arrest and conviction statistics. They ran the local court system and had access to all trial transcripts and legal evidence.
Similarly, they managed the entire legal system and hired, trained, managed and led two full generations of city attorneys and judges.
Either the Democrats are incompetent to the point of hopelessness or they succeeded.
Either the George Floyd death was the result of systemic racism or it was an isolated incident indicative of nothing in the wider population. If the former is true, then the Democrats are racist because they are the system. If the latter is true, than the news media is responsible for the riots because they took a statistical outlier and force-fed it to us as typical of the nation.
Which was it? Racist, incompetent Democrats or an insane news media?
The recent rioting and protests over the death of George Floyd are nothing more than a massive, violent snipe hunt.
Consider this: Who is opposing the protesters? Every politician has come out in agreement with them. Every media outlet is in agreement with them. There are no counter-demonstrations in support of the cop who apparently killed the dude. The Minneapolis PD charged the cop with murder within days of the event.
What are the two sides of the protest?
The simple and obvious answer is that there aren't two sides. There's only one side. We're all in agreement, cops using unnecessary force is wrong. We're burning and looting our cities in violent agreement.
The riots are supposedly about racism. Again, what are the two sides? Unlike the 1960s, there is no political force behind segregation, racial classification or racism in general. Well, other than the whiteness studies crew in the Democratic Party, I mean.
Then there's the problem of systemic racism. Where is it? How does it work? Minneapolis has been a progressive city for as long as I can remember. Every leader in the place has vigorously championed black equality and opposed racism for decades. The Democrats run every single element of the city's power structure and have for a long, long time. Progressive Democrats are the system. Can anyone explain how systemic racism happens there?
Finally, there is the problem of the data. The data doesn't show a lack of racism, it shows the opposite of racism. Go to Great Schools and look at the performance of black children in majority-black public high schools. Then look at their performance where they are a distinct minority. Over and over, I found that black kids test scores are lower in majority-black schools. If they do better around lots of whites, then racism cannot, c-a-n-n-o-t, cannot be a big deal.
Dittos for crime data. If most violent crime is black-on-black and most violent, interracial crime is black-on-white, then national, anti-black racism would seem to be difficult to prove.
Anyway, on with the snipe hunt! Get those snipes! Let's all come out against something that is practically irrelevant. A few months from now, given the odds in a nation of 330,000,000 people, there will be another incident where someone we've never met kills someone else we've never met and the snipe hunt will be repeated.
In Charles Murray's excellent book, Coming Apart, he describes how America has bifurcated into two different places. One is inhabited by the Aristocrats, the elite, educated professionals. They have their prestigious degrees and they generally marry within their group. They have almost nothing in common with the Normals, people without prestigious degrees and who work at blue collar or service jobs, if they work at all. There is a dramatic cultural separation between the two.
The Aristocrats are overwhelmingly Democrat. It's a thoroughly blue class.
The riots over the past few days have been almost entirely blue on blue. It's the campus radicals and the blacks sacking cities run by progressives, starting in Minneapolis, whose mayor couldn't be more of a prog if he tried. And believe me, he has.
Dittos for the riots in Portland, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York. Blue Aristocrats run them all and they are watching their cities looted by blue foot soldiers.
The reason that they can't stop the rioting is that, true to the thesis of Coming Apart, the Aristos don't understand the Normals. Not one, little bit. In their tony universities, like Minneapolis' Mayor Frey's Villanova, the students were taught about whiteness and privilege and social justice. They were taught the language of apology and contrition. They learned that the world was made up of good-hearted proles who only needed enlightened Aristos to lead them into a glorious future.
That world does not, in fact, exist.
That's why Democrat leaders, mouthing Democrat mantras about peace and justice, have failed to get these riots under control. Their allies in the media and entertainment don't understand the world of the Normals, either. Hence, suggestions by the press that this is the work of white supremacists and vows by Hollywood stars to bail out the rioters from jail.
I hate to say it, but as I watch this unfold and see how the blue Aristos still cling to their racial religion, I don't see any way this ends except in a splitting of America, along the lines of Kurt Schlichter's novels.
This topic is too depressing. Instead of posting a riot photo, here's a redhead who likes to drink at our bird bath. Enjoy.
... or maybe just a house on several acres of land.
My Dixie project raised bed is currently full of healthy, happy cotton and cayenne.
I swear, two of my Nankeen cotton plants (far side of the bed) grew an inch the other day.
I've got new, Virginia Red tobacco seeds coming next week, but nowhere to plant them. Optimally, I'd grow about 30 of them so I could make a significant mound of cured leaves to test my fermentation ideas. I've got a new idea, by the way. If I had that many, I'd be able to construct a chicken wire box to fill with hands of tobacco leaves, effectively simulating a core sample from a commercial tobacco fermentation barn.
Imagine creating a 2' x 2' vertical slice of this pile.
The problem isn't growing the stuff or harvesting it, the problem is that I've run out of space.
This is just one more reason to move to Dixie, buy a house on 40 acres and start a chihuahua plantation.
Updated Thoughts on the Riots
I'm kind of losing interest in them. This is a blue-on-blue civil war. The left has cultivated racial paranoia in the black community in order to keep their votes following decades of disastrous Democratic rule of black neighborhoods. Through the academy, they've cultivated of America-hating ANTIFA radicals. Now, blue cities are being sacked by the radicals the left has deliberately created.
This was all perfectly predictable, when you think about it. When rioting, people don't travel far. Given the Democrats' domination of the cities, it was only ever going to be blue cities that would be wrecked by these groups.
Hilariously, they're doubling down on the whole race thing, making insane claims about white supremacists being behind the riots. I guess we shouldn't be surprised, given that the left screams that women can become men. In for a dime of delusion, in for a dollar. On Twitter, el gato malo said it as well as it could be said.
given enough indoctrination, a post truth society can be conjured into existence.
The black community is playing checkers while the mainstream media is playing chess. Our youth will be imprisoned. Our neighborhoods will be destroyed. Our inability to think through emotional tragedies is our biggest curse, and the Democrat Party’s biggest blessing. pic.twitter.com/ncPAPq5Ajj
This is Jacob Frey, the impeccably credentialed (Villanova, class of 2009) and perfectly woke mayor of Minneapolis. Racial justice has been a big part of his political life.
Here are the standardized test results from Henry High, an 1100-student, majority-black high school in Minneapolis.
It's possible to succeed at Henry High. Black kids aren't succeeding, but as long as they vote, it's all good.
Vote Vote Vote
Votes are the only thing that matter. You can spend 12 years in the progs' school system and end up illiterate, just vote. You can riot and burn down businesses, just vote. You can shoot each other on the streets, just vote. Use drugs, wreck your life, drink too much, just vote. Vote vote vote.
Of Matches And Explosives
The press wants you to vote, too. For the right people, of course. That's why they pump stories that feed racial paranoia. There's a very narrow filter for the press. They're constantly on the lookout for stories where a white person inflicts some kind of damage on a black person. It's best if it's someone in authority and the very best are white cops doing it. Those stories have gone above the fold for a decade or more now. They run them for as long as they can, like hit Broadway plays.
Our schools are similarly filled with vote-groomers. My daughter went to a race-crazed public high school where her American History text book featured one story of racial injustice after another. Our local Catholic university has embraced the progs' version of Nazi Race Theory, Whiteness Studies. All across the country, the education industry teaches children to hate America. The NYT recently ran their 1619 Project series to engender hatred of America.
The progs don't care about the 550 black kids at Henry High, most of whom graduate unable to read. No one cares about the black kids at Camden High or at the high schools in Baltimore or Chicago, either. As long as you can read well enough to mark the right box on the ballot, it's all good. To ensure that you never deviate from voting for them, they feed your racial paranoia constantly.
Heck, Joe Biden even said recently that if you don't vote for him, you ain't black.
So now our cities are burning after a single incident where a guy we don't know was involved in the death of another guy we don't know. There's no indication that the event that led to the death was racially motivated. There's no indication that the death was caused by the acts of the first guy. Just yesterday, the coroner said he didn't suffocate or choke to death and that intoxicants in his body played a part in what looks to have been a heart attack.
Who cares? Burn the cities. Wreck your neighborhoods. Graduate from our schools unable to read. We don't care.
Minneapolis riot summary: Some guy you've never met got into an altercation with another guy you've never met. One of them died. Because of this, we're rallying tribal groups and Minneapolis is being sacked. Other cities are suffering some amount of looting and destruction.
Whenever there's some kind of rioting, all I want to do is crawl under my blankets and hide there. All of the rage and vitriol is so depressing. Instead of blogging about what's going on in Minneapolis and LA, let's talk about something fun.
I then went out and bought the audio version of Viscount Ridley's book, How Innovation Works. His primary thesis is that innovation is the product of trial and error more than anything else. I have a couple of patents and spent some time as a research scientist in my younger days. His assertion didn't ring true to me until I started thinking about my experiment with tobacco.
He's spot on as far as I can tell. When I thought about my inventions and documents, I realized that a great deal of trial and error went into all of them.
Going back to tobacco, my experiment failed when the leaves molded in the last step, fermentation. My postmortem made me wish I could try about a half dozen different ways of fermenting the stuff. Hobbyist fermentation of tobacco is trying to replicate what happens when you pile up the leaves in bulk in hot and humid places like the Carolinas or Cuba.
Since I don't have mounds of leaves and I live in arid San Diego, what I really want is a set of parallel experiments to try different ways to ferment small quantities of tobacco. What I want is trial and error.
Trial and error acknowledges that there are more variables or more candidate values for your variables than you can solve for analytically. As far as I can tell, the Viscount is right. Innovation owes a great deal to trial and error.
I finally looked into Twitter's recent decision to post "fact checking" links on President Trump's tweets. The first foray into Twitter's self-destruction is all about voting by mail.
First, Twitter may have just signed its own death warrant. The only way it can survive is by being classified as a platform instead of a publisher. A platform, like the phone company, exerts no editorial influence on the content. A publisher does. A platform has no exposure to libel or slander charges from whatever passes over it. A publisher does.
Second, the whole vote-by-mail thing is a frightening example of what happens when you have a news media that is partisan. They are completely missing the story here. The deplorables are screaming out that they want elections they can trust. That means at least moving in the direction of voter ID if not using it universally. Vote-by-mail is the exact opposite of that.
If the deplorables feel like the ballot harvesting in Orange County and places allowing illegals to vote is happening more generally, then the militia protests in Virginia and Michigan will be repeated, only this time with more vigor.
In Michigan, peaceful protesters showed their unhappiness with the governor's lockdown orders.
In Virginia, peaceful protesters showed their unhappiness with the Democrats' modifications to the Second Amendment.
I don't know how much clearer this can get for the press. If they weren't so busy being political activists, pushing their progressive narratives, they might see what's coming. They might help us see what's coming, too.
Nope.
As I blogged before, an insurrection won't look anything like what most people think.
(A)rguments against an informal militia standing up to the government featured
claims that hunting rifles were no match for fighter jets. One congressional
idiot even went so far as to talk about nuclear weapons. This was all wrong.
The
people fighting to get their livelihoods back aren't facing F-18s. They're going
up against cops. Very quickly, they've got the cops outnumbered and outgunned.
When their cause has some amount of righteousness, they've also got the sympathy
of law enforcement.
The UC system has decided to ditch the SATs because inequality.
The University of California board of regents voted Thursday to stop using the SAT and ACT college admissions exams, reshaping college admissions in one of the largest and most prestigious university systems in the country and dealing a significant blow to the multibillion-dollar college admission testing industry.
The unanimous 23-to-0 vote ratified a proposal put forward last month by UC President Janet Napolitano to phase out the exams over the next five years until the sprawling UC system can develop its own test.
The battle against standardized tests has raged for years because minority students score, on average, lower than their white classmates. Advocates argue that the exams are an unfair admission barrier to those students because they often cannot pay for pricey test preparation.
Yeah, it's all about expensive test prep classes. Just like it is at Camden High in New Jersey.
The kids can't read or do math..
... despite having plenty of teachers ...
... who graduate them anyway.
There's a single review comment about the school on the site.
Camden high school is a very good school but the only thing why parents think the teachers don't teach is because the students do not want to learn. These students in this school is very smart but they does not show it. Only if the students was less disruptive and start paying attention more than it would be good.
No one cares. The press is on high alert for any examples of racism, but totally ignore the hundreds of thousands of kids just like these. The teachers are negotiating for more pay and bigger pensions while keeping quiet about what is happening in their classrooms. The local politicians talk about everything except the wretched culture and the wrecked families.
Yes, by all means, let's ditch the SATs. Why do we want any objective measures of reality? If we have those, we'll just have to lie about them. It's best to hide reality so we don't have to lie so much.
OK, I'm over it. I'm over the whole Trump tantrum thing. I'm done with having a 5-year-old as president. I can't tell you what put me over the edge, but the straw camel's back broke the dam past the tipping point. Or something like that.
I'm still going to vote for the Orange Infant, but I've hit my limit with his childishness.
Having said that, I think he was absolutely necessary for two reasons. The first was that he exposed our Aristocratic class for what they are - experts of narrow breadth who think they're far wiser than they really are. Second, he taught the teachable people in the GOP that the press is the enemy. They're not mistaken, they're not acting on good faith, they're not trying to get the story right, they're progressive activists. They are the propaganda wing of the Democratic Party.
Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida has gotten the message. Dig this.
John McCain and Mitt Romney never understood that. They never punched back as the press drowned them in stories designed to advance their favored, progressive narratives. With Trump, we finally have someone who stands up for us against a media that has completely lost the plot.
Now that some of our politicians have gotten the message, I wish we could move on from the Big Brat. Oh well. I expect that Trump will beat Biden and whatever cabal of abusive manipulators form up behind him to pull his dementia-coated strings. We'll get another spate of great judges, but we'll also get 4 more years of fit-throwing.
I made a couple of changes to her recipe, so I thought I'd post them here both to share with you and store away for easier recall later.
My key to making perfect grilled chicken is to use the brining step to heat the meat. The biggest problem with grilling chicken is that the skins will get cooked long before the meat is done all the way through. Dark meat like thighs might even start a grease fire if you leave it over the coals too long as the fat drips down onto the flames. Ovening the meat on a covered grill to cook it all the way through makes the white meat dry.
To solve this and to deal with the fact that I probably haven't thawed the meat all the way because I forgot to take it out of the freezer two days earlier, I heat up my brine to 120 and drop in the chicken. The cold chicken cools the brine, so after a bit, I turn the heat back on and bring it back up to 120.
Whoa, Nellie, that's a far cry from a simple salt and brown sugar brine! I was concerned that it would dominate the flavor of Mary's excellent rub, but it didn't. In fact, it complimented her paprika, Cajun seasoning and brown sugar mix perfectly.
So there you have it. A complex brine to heat the chicken followed by Mary's excellent rub and probably 10 minutes or so of both direct and indirect heat on the grill with a painting of BBQ sauce at the very end. Enjoy!
I need to rant, but I don't want to do it too publicly. This blog doesn't get a lot of hits any more, so I'm going to do it here before, if my better nature doesn't slap me down, sending it as an email. I've already managed to say a tiny subset of this and it got me blocked on Twitter by someone I otherwise respect and like.
On with the self-immolation.
Up until yesterday, my favorite podcast was Clerically Speaking with Father Harrison and Father Anthony. I haven't missed one since they started. Yesterday, they had on Sister Theresa Aletheia and they discussed, among other things, the "double standards" for men and women in the Church. It drove me bonkers, particularly when they discussed sexual dynamics, especially dress.
JPII's Theology of the Body (TotB) says that men and women are different. Logically, you have different standards for different things. You don't judge an apple the way you judge a bar stool. On sexual matters, there is not a double standard, there is a single standard for each sex. Appearance is often a sexual matter, particularly when it comes to women trying to attract men.
When the sister launched into her complaints, the guys barely pushed back. Her positions were completely at odds with TotB as well as the science of primate sexuality, but that was ignored. Father Anthony weakly mentioned something about men being different, but Sister Aletheia smashed that down and it was generally agreed that men shouldn't be men and women should be able to wear whatever they want to church.
The priests had discussed TotB several times before on their show. As I listened, all I could think was that they weren't willing to defend their earlier statements. Pathetic.
If the faith doesn't reflect reality, then it has no more authority than intersectional feminism.
Years ago, I was dating a woman from work. She'd been lukewarm, but was worth another date. I had just gotten a big promotion which was announced at work. The next date, that skirt was short and tight. Yeah, honey, I got the message. A double standard? Nope. Two sexes with a standard for each. She liked a man with money and she hoped I liked what I saw. Women know what they're working with the yoga pants at Mass. Fathers Harrison and Anthony knew better, but stayed quiet.
Men aren't going to change the way they react to appearance and women don't want them to change. Without that, landing a guy would become nearly impossible. When they failed to make that point, all previous podcasts dealing with St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas and TotB were devalued as they let her drive a bus right over them.
Augustine and JPII recognized sexual differences. Aquinas recognized the value of science in revealing God to us. We now know how visual stimuli work on the limbic systems of male primates. This isn't a secret and keeping quiet when someone is talking bollocks about it just makes you look weak and insincere.
Men's addictions to porn got some blame. Porn isn't the habituator for a lack of control, it's a drug that exploits a natural weakness in the male, one that is similarly exploited by women who are looking for a man. Take a look at clubwear for women and clubwear for men and let me know what you find. The fashion houses serving those clients are experts and make a living reading human nature.
JPII knew this as well, which is why he codified Catholic teaching with TotB. I thought the guys had bought into that as they had done several shows on the topic, but she came along and challenged a logical inference from the central tenet of the thing and they folded like damp laundry.
If "double standards" bother you, that's something you're going to have to learn to accept. They exist in human sexuality and despite Sister Aletheia's claims of feminine prescience, women most certainly do not understand how men react to visual, sexual stimuli. Shrewd ones know how to exploit it, but they can only see the surface reactions even as they're hoping for a primal response.
On a humorous note, the whole time I was listening, I was thinking that the podcast desperately needed Aunt Boo. That woman, she understands Theology of the Body, apparently a good deal better than Fathers Harrison and Anthony.
Stung by my recent epic failure with my tobacco crop when mold wiped it out in the final stage, fermentation, I've been watching videos showing how the large growers ferment the stuff. Dig this one.
All a home grower is doing at the end is replicating this process. Note that the barn is well-ventilated. Air movement is key to avoiding mold.
But notice something else: the tobacco fermentation is happening because the leaves at the bottom are being pressed together by the weight of the leaves on the top. Having said that, the leaves on the bottom have no idea that the pressure is coming from other tobacco leaves.
What if you piled the cured leaves together and held them down with a coarsely-woven cloth like burlap? You could pile the leaves on a table, drape a square of burlap over them and tie weights to the corners of the burlap square. You'd get air movement, pressure and ... fermentation?
I see two drawbacks to this experiment. The first is unavoidable and that is the cycle time on the thing is several months. The tobacco has to be grown from seed, harvested, cured and then fermented. If I'm going to do it, I need to start now, as in today.
The second is that the barn in the video is undoubtedly in a humid locale. I'm in San Diego where we'll get the hot days, but it will be a dry heat. I'm not sure how to solve that one and retain the air movement crucial to avoiding a recurrence of the mold.
There's a huge advantage to this method, however. The fermentation device will need almost no construction and won't require a heat source. The latter would be a fire hazard and in San Diego, fires are catastrophic, not just for you, but for everyone in your neighborhood.
Hmm. Well, it looks like I better get started with the seeds today. This time, I'm only going to plant one kind, the Virginians. That will simplify a lot of things. Growing the plants will give me two months to solve the humidity problem. I will also be a lot more sciencey and take measurements and make science noises as I grow them. Charts, graphs, tables, equations, all of that science stuff will be produced.
Unless I get bored and just turn on my Confederate Railroad playlist and eat barbecue while I watch my tobacco grow. If that happens, I'll just grow the darn things, cure them and then try my fermentation experiment.
... and they reach the limits of their expertise long before they'll admit it and long before we realize it. That was the original genius of America. It gave the individual maximal decision authority because reality is best assessed by those closest to it. Aristocrats, be they of noble blood or with prestigious degrees, may well be smarter and wiser than we are, but their decision-making advantages are much smaller than most believe.
Dig this.
JPMorgan has a devastating piece arguing that infection rates have declined — not increased — in states where lockdowns have ended, “even after allowing for an appropriate measurement lag.” (Kolonavic)
— Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla) May 20, 2020
That tells you a couple of things. First, the experts were wrong about the lockdown. In hindsight, it appears obvious, but it wasn't at the time. The initial restrictions were a good decision because our data from socialist China was so poor that we had to collect our own before we could accurately assess the situation. After that, the experts hit and passed the limits of their expertise and we would have been far better off doing our own, individual risk assessments.
Instead of economy-crippling, addiction-boosting lockdowns, it would have been better to temporarily ban large-scale, high-compression gatherings like subway rides and sporting events. Given what we quickly learned about mortality statistics, we would have been well-advised to isolate the elderly as well.
After that, the experts not only had nothing to offer, but actually, through their boundless hubris, did enormous damage with their mandates. A traditional, American response would have been for the experts to offer broad suggestions and allow the Normals to make their own decisions. Instead, as Michael Barone discussed in this essay, our nation has indeed been fundamentally transformed along progressive lines and we now grant far more authority to our aristocrats than they deserve.
Fundamental attitudes can change in a nation over half a century, and the very different responses to this year’s coronavirus epidemic and the influenzas of 50 and 60 years ago suggests that people today are much more risk averse, much more willing to undergo massive inconvenience and disruption to avoid marginal increases in fatal risk.
The essay is typically excellent and worth reading the whole thing.
When progressives talk about fundamentally reshaping or reforming America, it's really all about risk avoidance. Everyone should get health insurance so no one has to risk being without it because some don't have a good enough job. Everyone should get housing because addicts can't afford it. Voting should be done almost automatically because some won't figure out how to go to the polls.
In short, the more of our decision-making we hand off to the experts, the lower our overall risk levels will be. At least that's the idea. It's all bollocks, of course. Our Ivy League aristocrats have gotten us a $25T+ debt, a losing, 20-year war in Afghanistan, culturally ruined black neighborhoods, below-replacement birth rates, familial decay through marriage avoidance and much, much more.
The experts hit their limits long, long ago, but we keep turning to them for advice. Some of it is worthwhile, but very little of it. We'd be far better off making our own decisions and handling our own lives instead of thinking they will create a Utopia that will save us from risk.
Their expertise is almost all illusion anyway. In the end, we'll have to go back to making our own decisions like traditional Americans because we'll have run out of money to pay for the experts brilliant ideas.
Note: these numbers have gone up since I posted this.
Apparently, super-secret emails have revealed the Susan Rice, a brainiac working for Obama, was coaching James Comey, another brainiac working for Obama, how to spot Russians trying to cut their own pay by helping Trump get elected. Or something like that.
Man, it's a good thing those brainiacs have prestigious degrees. Otherwise, we'd think they were ordinary morons instead of brainiacs. Maybe that's what a degree does for you. It's just a marker that keeps people from assessing you by your performance and views. Hmm.
Anywho, the two of them and the rest of their brainiac cabal decided to withhold classified information from Mike Flynn, who was Trump's incoming NSA dude.
And then what?
For how long?
I guess I'm not as smart as the Obama people because I can't figure out how this was supposed to end in something other than a total collapse of their complicated conspiracy the way all complicated conspiracies end. Maybe next time they could try staffing their squad with something other than self-important wonks.
These folks were going to keep running the country after their president left. Yeah, right.
I've spent some time thinking about how my tobacco crop got ruined by mold while it was supposed to be fermenting. More research on the topic has confirmed my decision to throw all of it away. What I can't figure out is how to be successful at it if I do it again.
In the fermentation process, cured leaves are stored in huge piles and the leaves on the bottom ferment, sweating out their ammonia. Farmers keep thermometers at the bottom of the piles. Increased temperatures indicate fermentation is occurring and when the action gets too hot and heavy, they toss the pile so fresh leaves are at the bottom. At least that's what I think I read.
These piles are stored in barns in places with high humidity, high temperatures and plenty of air flow. I was able to simulate the humidity and the temperature, but I didn't work out the air flow. Without it, mold is almost a foregone conclusion.
While my Momma Daisy Memorial Chamber of Doom Tobacco Fermenter could hit 120 F without a problem, it had difficulties maintaining humidity unless I put damp cloths in the chamber. My biggest mistake was to drape those damp cloths over the tobacco. I did that because the leaves had all dryed out. My second mistake was to not toss the salad every day. Researching the mold problem shows that unless the leaves are moved around every day, you get mold.
Finally, I don't think the solar Chamber of Doom was a good solution. It only hit 120 for about 8 hours a day and the fermentation process really wants 120 all day. If I do it again, and I'm sure I will, I'll have to break down and build a real chamber with a heating element and a thermostat. I avoided that because I didn't want the fire risk of the heating element, but that's a problem I'm sure I can solve.
It's really bugging me that this was a failure. I had my heart set on smoking my own tobacco while listening to Old Bocephus.
"We make our own whiskey and our own smoke, too. Ain't too many things these ol' boys can't do."
I think it's a revolt. It may not be a full-fledged revolution, but it's heartening to see Americans behaving like, well, Americans and not allowing politicians to dictate their lives. Hopefully it will have some lasting effects and we'll find a little more personal freedom spine after this.
The beach at the Virginia Beach Oceanfront was closed today. But it was packed.
— The Virginian-Pilot (@virginianpilot) May 17, 2020
What a beautiful sight.
One more quick take. Governor Whitmer of Michigan made this claim to that premier toady to the Elite, Jake Tapper, about the militiamen protesting her tyranny.
“Some of the outrageousness of what happened in our Capitol this week depicted some of the worst racism and awful parts of our history in this country,” Whitmer in response to questions from host Jake Tapper. “The Confederate flags and nooses, swastikas and the behavior that you’ve seen in all of the clips, is not representative of who we are in Michigan.”
I dunno, man. I watched a whole bunch of raw videos of the events and I didn't see any rebel flags or nooses. If there were swastikas, it was a finger pointed at her, not indicating support for any other führer.
It tells you everything you need to know that Tapper didn't push back on the Confederate flag references. The stars and bars in Michigan? Really? The claim was instantly recognizable as the preferred spasmodic reflex of the left when they're criticized. It's no wonder that Jake didn't question it as most of the press are nothing more than lickspittles for the progressives. In any case, had there been a rebel flag or two in the bunch, you still couldn't have made the case for that particular revolt being race-based.
All the same, RACISM! is the favorite shriek of the Elites. Since they're not very clever, one can hardly expect them to find a new line of attack. That one has a ways to go before they realize that it's empty of meaning.
