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God willing I'll do another YouTube stream tomorrow night around 8:00 PM Pacific.

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Suicide Watch

The old joke Washington Post headline, "Meteor to Obliterate Earth, Women and Minorities Hardest Hit" works because it's a fair description of a well worn media template, getting more worn by the day in our Current Year of Salon-Vox-Slate thumb-suckers: "social effect x occurs, protected class(es) disproportionately affected".

There's always been an unacknowledged concomitant to this model--a once implicit now explicit stricture: there are no particular white concerns or needs, there is only "privilege". Indeed, whites faring better than the norm on any given metric is always evidence of privilege, not agency or virtue. The joke could just as well have been "Meteor to Obliterate Earth,  Whites Least Affected".

When researchers first started reporting evidence of rising mortality in white America they were pilloried for concerning themselves with white health. One common response to its mention (see Salon-Vox-Slate) is to note whites are still ahead of blacks and browns in wealth and health. If you buy into blank-slate notions you see this as a straight measure of "privilege"; if you buy into common sense you see this as the measure of ruin left in the nation.

Whites have lost the ability to see the crime in this because we've been stripped of the concept of "us" by the reigning cultural order. The dying off of white Americans is a direct result of the same culture that suppresses its notice, much less analysis or address as such. Like rising mortality in a wealthy society, this is without historical precedent, a people unable to see themselves as such--at least one not physically conquered.

The Wall Street Journal

Life expectancy for Americans fell again last year, despite growing recognition of the problems driving the decline and federal and local funds invested in stemming them.

Data the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released on Thursday show life expectancy fell by one-tenth of a year, to 78.6 years, pushed down by the sharpest annual increase in suicides in nearly a decade and a continued rise in deaths from powerful opioid drugs like fentanyl. Influenza, pneumonia and diabetes also factored into last year’s increase.

Economists and public-health experts consider life expectancy to be an important measure of a nation’s prosperity. The 2017 data paint a dark picture of health and well-being in the U.S., reflecting the effects of addiction and despair, particularly among young and middle-aged adults, as well as diseases plaguing an aging population and people with lower access to health care.

“The continuation of this trend is a warning for all of us that our country has not found a way of addressing the profound needs of the people who are dying,” said Eric Caine, professor of psychiatry and director of the Injury Control Research Center for Suicide Prevention at the University of Rochester Medical Center. “While the economy may be recovering at the macro level, it’s very uncertain whether it’s affecting the lives of these people.”  

The U.S. has lost three-tenths of a year in life expectancy since 2014, a stunning reversal for a developed nation, and lags far behind other wealthy nations... 

White men and women fared the worst, along with black men, all of whom experienced increases in death rates. Death rates rose in particular for adults ages 25 to 44, and suicide rates are highest among people in the nation’s most rural areas. On the other hand, deaths declined for black and Hispanic women, and remained the same for Hispanic men.

Black men continue to lead in mortality (suffered and dealt), ironically enough (and this is just my racist opinion) by living it up, via a thriving hip hop culture--which is part and parcel of the broader culture in which whites are not thriving.

Elite whites would do well to drop their hostility to white identity--just as declining morals infect a population by welling from the bottom up, so will their consequences.

...

Eventually everything I have to tell will be told, worthy or not, whether it will find a receptive audience or not, I don't care. It's all in the telling for me now. If a tree falls in the forest…indeed. You will listen. You may not like what you hear, you’ll likely be bored to tears, let me tell you my friend: you should try having lived this pointless, directionless life. I envy you, and I don’t even know you. If I can't have your life I will try to unload some of mine onto yours. I don’t care if you want to hear it or not. I am grabbing you by the collar, pulling you in close, you can smell my foul breath, you can see my dirt filled pores, you try to wiggle free but I have the strength of the psychotic and I’m leaning in on you, saying, you gotta hear this, buddy…

Art and Survival

Considering the possibility of a new robust post-poz art with Ecce Lux and Babylonian Hebrew.

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...

I came to laying on my side on a concrete bench. My head was at such an extreme angle and my neck so stiffened that I knew raising it would be painful, if not impossible; I opted to roll over onto my stomach and slowly push myself up into a sitting position while leaving my head, more or less, in its listing attitude. This too was no easy feat, accomplished by grunting, groaning effort. Laughter, accompanied by a lewdly malicious voice, attracted my attention from the other end of the cell. Two locals were sitting there watching me. He spoke again, the fat one with the leer in his voice and eyes, in a colloquial Spanish that I didn't understand. I said nothing.

Looking down I noticed my pockets had been turned inside out; my shoes were gone. I did not yet know how I arrived there; I sensed a partially formed, vague memory lurking just below the surface of consciousness. I tried retracing my steps mentally: the girl in the bar, dancing, being led onto the beach, rolling around in the sand. So far so good; then she's screaming at me; I was beseeching her to be quiet, asking in broken Spanish what was wrong: trying to ask

¿Cuál es la materia?

and just managing to stammer-shout, qual estimer! qual estimer! At the same time thinking her hysteria seemed odd, acted. I recall the impulse: Get away, get away from her. Several missing frames later and I'm struggling up an incline in the deep, loose Baja sand; wheezing, stagger-running, covering as much distance from side to side as forward but making progress back toward the plaza, and the hotel. Memory submerged, and only briefly resurfaced to reveal a glimpse of being herded into the back of a Mexican police car by baton blows, kicks, and epithets.

I was now staring at the wall across from me; it was covered in a profusion of graffiti, mostly vulgarities in Spanish. I realized I had been staring at a word. It shimmied and danced as a pair that separated, nearly aligned, and separated again repeatedly as I fought my double vision. I tried closing one stinging eye; I couldn't, like a very young child who can't yet wink. So I placed a hand, trembling slightly as if a small electric current was running through it, over one eye.
Slowly the word came into focus. No, I thought, no possible way. But there it was. Faint and weathered by countless years, crudely etched in jagged lines; I could just make out:
UNTETHERED

Scratch an SJW...

It played out like countless controversies: offense is taken, racism is charged, social media is mobilized, capitulation is achieved. Only this one played out in China:

Dolce Gabbana has postponed a catwalk show in Shanghai after an outcry over racially offensive posts on its Instagram account that the fashion brand has claimed were written by hackers. 

The controversy arose after the Italian fashion brand published a video on the Chinese social media site Weibo on Monday showing a Chinese model using chopsticks to try to eat a pizza, a cannoli and spaghetti. 

Weibo users accused the label of trivialising China’s culture and depicting Chinese women in a racist way. The video was taken down within 24 hours but it had already been shared widely on social media, where the hashtag #BoycottDolce began to circulate.

The accusations of racism and racial stereotyping intensified after what appeared to be an Instagram direct message conversation between Stefano Gabbana and the fashion writer Michaela Phuong was shared by Diet Prada, an Instagram account known for criticising the fashion industry.

American Renaissance subtitled their excerpt of the story: "China’s social justice warriors are as thin-skinned as America’s" but, as their comments section immediately noted, no. Not at all.
These are social justice tactics, but the warriors are nationalists.

If there is a social justice warrior contingent in China worthy of the name they are indifferent to or approving of an offense given to Han Chinese--they would have been more likely to take offense on behalf of Italians.

Thin-skinned the offended are, but out of the excess pride of an ascendant and confident nation. I suspect they are not snowflakes, either. What's relatively new here is their adoption of the social justice logic and tactics cultivated by our own anti-nationalists on the left. As long as social justice reigns in the West its adversaries will take advantage of it, and we can probably expect more, not less, of this.

It isn't new; Russian (and other) "hackers" seek out the divisions created by diversity and exploit them:

Many of the tactics that Russia experiments with could (and likely will) be enacted on a much larger scale two years from now [2020]. Some of these strategies and maneuvers appear grounded in reality, while others seem speculative, but all have the same sinister goal of breaking the system—by cleaving our polity, distracting us with feuds large and small—by sowing discord through technology platforms and services. 

“Having the U.S. at war with itself is giving Russia credit internationally,” explained Andrew Weiss, the vice president for research on Russia for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, noting that we as a country are more divided on almost every issue than at any other time in history. “[Russia is] not the creator of this problem, but they have exploited it. Just creating mistrust, and throwing a question mark over the legitimacy of our government, is a pretty big prize for Russia.” 

Another distinction is made obsolete. The divide is between those who advocate on behalf of their own--whether via identity politics in the West or openly as ethnic nationalists--and those who don't--white "social justice warriors", who march shoulder-to-shoulder with these ethnic nationalists chanting the same slogans.

If I was China I'd look for ways to co-opt Asian activists and grievance in the West. Because, after all, there is no difference between the offense a Chinese patriot and an American-born Chinese take at such as the Dolce & Gabbana ad. The latter doesn't even attempt any more to clad his ethnic pride in social justice scales: no, he'll tell you he defends a proud, superior even, people and culture.

The legal and cultural structure set up by social justice is ready-made for the final looting of the American economic and cultural legacy, which seems to be well under way. China and other countries can be expected to merge with their minority US populations politically and culturally, as they are working hard to do now.

Global ethnic communities operating under cover of globalism is one very possible future. Cheerio.

Intersectionality at the Intersection

Source: Brandon Farley

Law and Order, Current Year Unit

You can almost hear the Law and Order clang when reading the FBI report on their take-down of a white prison gang no one has heard of outside of Georgia:

SAVANNAH, GA: More than 40 associates of the notorious Ghost Face Gangsters criminal street gang have been indicted on federal charges related to drug trafficking and firearms possession throughout eastern Georgia and beyond.

A 93-page, 83-count federal grand jury indictment unsealed Nov. 16 in U.S. District Court in Savannah lists the charges against 43 men and women for a multitude of offenses involving trafficking methamphetamine, cocaine and heroin, announced Bobby L. Christine, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Georgia. Federal, state and local agencies cooperated in the investigation dubbed Operation Vanilla Gorilla.

The indictment alleges that the narcotics-trafficking conspiracy began as early as 2015 and continued until the present, operating in Bryan, Chatham, Effingham, Emmanuel, Evans, and Tattnall Counties, in the Southern District of Georgia, and elsewhere. Members of the conspiracy associated with the Ghost Face Gangsters, a violent, white supremacist street gang operated largely from inside prisons, and with other criminal street gangs to aid in the distribution of controlled substances, for protection, and to promote a climate of fear.

Operation Vanilla Gorilla represents one of the largest takedowns of Ghost Face Gangsters associates to date, and follows the March 2018 arrests of 23 gang members in the Northern District of Georgia on federal charges, and multiple arrests in October 2018 on state charges in Spalding County, Ga.

Charges against the defendants in Operation Vanilla Gorilla include:

• 25 counts alleging the possession of controlled substances with intent to distribute;

• 18 counts alleging the unlawful distribution of controlled substances; 

• 25 counts alleging prohibited persons (drug users and/or felons) in possession of firearms and/or ammunition; 

• One count alleging the unlawful possession of a prohibited weapon – a sawed-off rifle; 

• One count alleging the possession of a firearm with an obliterated serial number; 

• 10 counts alleging the possession of controlled substances, including methamphetamine, heroin, crack cocaine, marijuana, and prescription pills; and, 

• 2 counts alleging the possession of counterfeit currency.

This sounds like a slow weekend for Detroit's last remaining honest cops.

But these are "white supremacists" so...



Not that there's anything wrong with arresting drug dealers.
Jeff Sessions re-focused the Justice Department on traditional law and order and announced indictments against California's Mexican Mafia last May, and went after MS-13 in June.
I suspect and fear we'll miss that man.

...

He stands on the corner addressing the cars that speed or creep by, oblivious to him. When traffic stops at the light he singles out a motorist whom he then appeals to directly, taking on a familiar air, as if speaking to an acquaintance, smiling. Most don't see him, some give him a moment's bored glance. None seem find him as alarming as his appearance should merit, long unwashed and transmitting the incoherent, insect energy of the manic; as the car moves on he effortlessly goes from intimate to stage manner of speech, back to engaging the multitude.
A crumpled cardboard sign lies at his feet, something is scrawled on it. Occasionally he turns about, addressing a pedestrian; none acknowledge him. His ranting grows more impassioned, his gestures grander, the longer you watch him. He pauses occasionally for effect, in a professorial manner stroking a beard that looks as if it's made of cigar ash, with his other hand a fist pressed against his hip and pulling back an overcoat bearing the satiny sheen of of caked-on dirt; sometimes he nods with pursed lips, as if to punctuate some earnest and frank aphorism; he sighs as if having unloaded a weighty truth.

You can't help yourself; you move in closer to try to catch what he's saying. Bits of it come through the crashing, rising and falling sound waves of traffic and the continual hum of everything else: "...representation; representation not of reality--no! Representation of representation..." he repeatedly reaches a climax of excited declamation, then falls back to a quiet, musing tone, gradually ascending until reaching the next peak, against which the flood of his thoughts spends itself like a crashing wave, and back again, on and on, important-sounding and nonsensical: "...closed to the real; not an alternative, no; a refutation..." Everything is so very important, so vital, so much the release of concentrated and long restrained energy that you think at any moment he will simply blast off from his feet, whistling and spiraling in a failed arc like an errant firework, to smash himself against one of the buildings nearby.

He sees you watching him; his eyes somehow grow even more intense; he is delighted, enlivened anew, as he addresses you directly. You are across the broad and busy boulevard from him, but, unnerved, you find yourself stepping back slightly, alarmed and repulsed but more curious than ever.
He breaks into a chant. He is increasingly agitated now, from all the way across the street you can see that he is trembling. You can't hear him, the wind-noise of the traffic seems to be coming out of his mouth as he repeats a single word over and over. Pedestrians are starting to notice him now, people are watching him warily as they hurry past behind him, cutting him a wider swath. He is leaning back, as if to give his words a higher trajectory to carry them farther, leaning back dangerously, deliriously, until finally he falls to the ground, and your stomach contracts in response to the crack of his head against the pavement.

Now a few people have stopped; most are merely staring; one man is kneeling near the fallen man. You move toward him reactively, without thought, stepping off the curb; as your foot lands in the street it somehow makes the sound of a foghorn; how odd, you think in the fraction of a second within which this occurs. But the sound is not coming from the ground, it's coming from the side; still held within this clear, surreal pixel of a moment, you turn to face the noise.

The bus is so large, so impossible, you think that you are hallucinating; because if it is that near, coming that fast, it can only mean...
There is a flash of white, followed by a freeze-frame snapshot, the photo-finish produced by billions of synapses in unison sounding their last alarm, of what you know is your final glimpse of the world: the driver's mouth in a little o, obscured behind the sunlight reflecting off of the big, flat windshield, and the destination sign above it. In this boundless split-second of final consciousness, only vaguely aware that you're tumbling headlong in space, you realize the word over the windshield is familiar, and another realizaton follows, as now you find you're reading the lips of the street corner lunatic after the fact, because this is the word he was repeating; it's not possible, it simply cannot be, but there it is in black and white, printed on the brow of the bus that is bearing down on you:
UNTETHERED

Absolute Weekend Recap

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Pozzland Dispatch, 11/19/18: Patriots v Hatriots

The pro-Trump group Patriot Prayer (routinely described as "far right" but somehow eluding the "hate group" distinction by the Southern Poverty Law Center) emerged from the street brawling days of the 2016 presidential campaign. Its founder says he started the group when he saw Trump supporters attacked on the street.

Its sole purpose seems to be to troll Seattle and, mostly, Portland (from across the Columbia in Vancouver) by organizing "free speech" demonstrations to elicit violent responses from the left, and has been doing this regularly since early 2017, with at least eight successful provocations by my quick count, with their most successful, measuring by trouble caused, the June riot of this year when a mob of antifa and the like attacked the group after it left a rally across from City Hall and the optics went global.

An August rally by about a hundred of them drew several hundred aggressive counter-protesters, who were held in check only by a massive police presence. The city is looking for ways out, but the city council earlier this week voted down a proposed ordinance targeting Patriot Prayer that would have limited street demonstrations. The progressives on the council and their supporters in the streets don't trust the law won't be applied to them as well--and the latter are having way too much fun.

Within days another scheduled Patriot demonstration punctuated the city's failed effort. "Him Too" was the cause--advocating on behalf of men falsely accused of sexual assault. It proved suitably provocative, and the counter-demonstrations naturally formed around Me Too.

Hours before the rally leftists gave speeches in an adjacent park.



Flyers posted about town purported to reveal some Patriot Prayer members as sexual abusers:

As the hour approached more and more lefties filled the streets, but no sign of a right wing presence. At one point a lone young man with an American flag marched down the street dividing a knot of sneering antifa and police barricading the park.

Moments later a young man in black with a bandanna over his face emerged from the antifa lines and, literally pointing-and-sputtering, began shouting "that's Andy Ngo! He's a fascist rape apologist! That's Andy Ngo! He's a..."

Ngo is a Portland State graduate and writer for Quillette who's despised by local antifa for, among other things, organizing a talk by James Damore of the Google Memo fame at the school and arguing against the leftist canon from a libertarian perspective.

Later I saw him in Chapman square, the small park block from which antifa was basing its operations. Antifa surrounded and harassed him, with one older member leaning in doing the I'm-a-tough-guy-smell-my-breath routine, threatening and calling him a "coward".

A large group of #antifa protesters encircled me. After I am pushed away, a masked woman sprays my camera equipment & myself w/wet silly string. They then play music & laugh. I want to file a harassment report with @PortlandPolice but the assailant's identity is unknown. pic.twitter.com/U0EWZcw8lF

— Andy C. Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) November 18, 2018

(That's me in the green and white jacket behind antifa messing with my dead phone).

Minutes before the start of the rally there were only a few dozen supporters in the park--cordoned off by metal barricades all around except for a single entry-exit point at one corner. I went through after a brief inspection that consisted of opening my jacket.A few dozen or so milled about the mini-amphitheater in the center of the park. Four or five cops swept through at one point and singled out one guy, then another for questioning. A Patriot leader made excuses for the turnout and no-show speakers who were "stuck in traffic"; the event was a bust.

It didn't matter. There might not have been fifty right-wingers total, and few of them geared up for battle as in past demonstrations. Meanwhile across the street and all around them the left had amassed two or three hundred, a high proportion battle-clad.

At the end of the Patriot rally the typical scenario unfolded, with antifa descending on vulnerable smaller groups trying to get home. I trailed one group of maybe ten Patriots being stalked by hundreds of antifa.

Here Patriot strongman Tiny Toese is almost completely alone on the street trailed by antifa:



Antifa has women. I'm struck by how often the figure wrapped up like a black mummy emits the screech of the post-adolescent female.
This contingent of black-clad co-eds went about in black and yellow (I think the common black-and-yellow worn by antifa is designed to confuse them with cops, who wear black and yellow too--whatever the case, it gets confusing) with a "Fuck Proud Boys" sign and are typical:



As often as not you'll see some 90-pound girl up in the front of the ranks relishing the feeling of power of standing down the cops. And they still reserve their fiercest ire for police.

But nobody seems to notice or care the Patriot rally was a flop. Had it been allowed to occur without attention this whole cycle might have stopped right there. Whatever the case, the Patriots seem to be running out of steam, whereas the left here is still itching for a fight. They say they want to be rid of Patriot Prayer and "hate", but I think they doth counter-protest too much. And too enthusiastically.

Mind the Gapped

The nation is so cowed by political correctness controversy isn't what it used to be.
When I heard a city councilman somewhere had used the phrase "master race" my morbid self rose to the clickbait, expecting to learn some poor soul went off-matrix and starting ranting about race and all that entails.

But no, it turns out "master race" is a phrase, like "nigger", that not only offends when used in earnest, it can't be uttered in context, and certainly not in jest.
Political correctness expanded beyond barring the (ever growing realm of) offensive to things that remind one of the offensive at some point. Now we can't even be trusted with our own language, uttering child-like constructs such as "the N-word". That this is the ineffable name of our time, like Yahweh, shows you who sits atop the hierarchy of grievance that is our quasi-religious order now.

Turns out the controversy was over a councilman making a joke about the concept of "master race" in front of a black woman, with whom he actually shared an affinity

 “I don’t want you to think I am picking on you because we are part of the master race,” Klemp told Penelton. “You have a gap in your teeth. We are part of the master race. Don’t you forget that.”
Klemp, chairman of the three-member commission, also has a gap in his teeth. Fellow commissioners Robert Holland and Doug Smith have also called for Klemp to leave.

We in the gap-toothed community were not consulted.

Portland Report

This is local professional woman of color Alyssa Pariah speaking in downtown Portland today at a demonstration opposing a scheduled "#HimToo" rally in support of men falsely accused of sexual assault.

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Pozztown Dispatch

Earlier this week Portland voted down an ordinance restricting public demonstrations. The city has been the scene for serial warfare between Vancouver, Washington based (just over the river) Proud Boys affiliate Patriot Prayer, and antifa. Patriot Prayer stages a demonstration for a provocative (to the pozzed--"free speech" being one) cause and antifa show up--in increasingly organized and aggressive fashion.
The economic cost and embarrassment for the city has been substantial. I suspect somewhere a cop has got a new boat with all the overtime, another one is adding on to the house...
I don't blame them. It's thankless work.

The police chief offered the bill and the mayor supported it, in hopes of being rid of the Patriots.

The same left that turns up attempting to physically drive them out of town opposed the ordinance thinking, sensibly, that the same rule would then be turned upon them. It is notable the city wasn't looking to limit protests when it was just the locals throwing a tantrum over Trump's election and breaking stuff.

So, wasting no time, combatants announce it's on, for tomorrow:

Rival protests are planned Saturday in downtown Portland, which could draw several hundred people — and potential conflict — to a pair of parks near City Hall.

An offshoot of the right-wing group Patriot Prayer scheduled a #HimToo rally and their left-wing opponents plan to hold counter demonstrations.

The demonstrations once again provide an opportunity for rival political factions to confront each other in the center of the city, in this case only days after a failed attempt by Mayor Ted Wheeler to restrict violent protests that have become a fixture in Portland.

I'll try to be on hand and livestream it at my YouTube channel.

Six of one, half dozen of the other

Donald Trump has thrown in with criminal justice reform:

President Trump threw his support behind a substantial revision of the nation’s prison and sentencing laws on Wednesday, opening a potential path to enacting the most significant changes to the criminal justice system in a generation. 

The tentative legislative package, developed by a bipartisan group of senators and called the First Step Act, builds on a prison overhaul bill already passed overwhelmingly by the House by adding changes that would begin to unwind some of the tough-on-crime federal policies of the 1980s and 1990s that incarcerated African-American offenders at much higher rates than white offenders. 

Combining new funding for anti-recidivism programs, the expansion of early-release credits for prisoners and the reduction of certain mandatory minimum sentences, the compromise bill would help shape the experiences of tens of thousands of current inmates and future offenders. 

“In many respects, we’re getting very much tougher on the truly bad criminals — of which, unfortunately, there are many,” said Mr. Trump, flanked by Republican lawmakers and law enforcement officials. “But we’re treating people differently for different crimes. Some people got caught up in situations that were very bad.” 

Just before his firing Jeff Sessions was still pushing against reform.

The proposed law would in effect roll back the Clinton Administration's 1994 Crime Bill which locked up more criminals, or in the soft Orwellian language of the Current Year, "raised incarceration rates". There is no difference between the two, but the latter is bad.

In politics locking up criminals used to be a thing. Clinton was quaintly defending it as late as the 2016 presidential campaign, before having his ass handed to him by the Narrative and apologizing. Politicians now campaign on "reducing incarceration rates", where they once campaigned on "locking up criminals"--Trump being an exception, and all the more a disappointment now for climbing down. If the Left has its way, he'll be the last national candidate who dares advocating for locking up criminals, openly.

Recall police were being executed in the streets by radicalized Black Lives Matter supporters during the 2016 campaign as part of what Steve Sailer calls the "Late Obama Age Collapse."  No small part of Trump's appeal was his old-fashioned call for law and order in the face of BLM agitation, which is a kind of criminal advocacy.

The average white American hadn't necessarily experienced an increase in crime but he knew, in 2016 as he knows now, that the problem with criminal justice isn't its "racism". Trump appeared, as if on cue, to provide us with the opportunity to strike back.

This cave from Trump and Jeff Sessions' departure threaten his gains of the past two years in rolling back Obama era excess.
Jeff Sessions spoke uncompromisingly against reform while Attorney General and issued a memo on his way out limiting the pursuit and extent of consent decrees--seeking to preempt a return to Obama/Holder's political weaponization of them.

The bill, which would take more people out of prison and into halfway houses, reverts to Obama-era policy and is sold in part on its economics--it's cheaper to put someone in a halfway house than a cell (and an ankle bracelet for home detention is cheaper still) and the Bureau of Prisons ran a shortfall of 40 million last year.

Apparently under Sessions' authority convicts were serving out more of their sentences and spending less time in the bloated industry of halfway house contractors that rose to meet Obama-era demand.
Prisoner advocate the Marshall Project complained just last month:

In federal penitentiaries across the nation, prisoners eagerly awaiting a transfer to halfway houses say they are being told that they will have to wait weeks or months longer than they had anticipated because there is a shortage of beds at the transitional group homes. 

But that’s not true. According to inmates, halfway house staff and industry officials, scores of beds lie empty, with some estimates of at least 1,000 vacant spaces. They remain unused due to a series of decisions that have sharply reduced the number of prisoners sent to halfway houses. And home confinement, a federal arrangement similar to house arrest that allows prisoners to complete their sentences with minimal supervision, is being even more drastically curtailed. 

The Bureau of Prisons says it is curbing overspending of past years and streamlining operations, but that doesn’t make sense. Putting inmates in halfway houses or on home confinement is much cheaper than imprisonment. The federal government spent almost $36,300 a year to imprison an inmate, $4,000 more compared with the cost to place a person in a halfway house in 2017, according to the Federal Register. It costs $4,392 a year to monitor someone on home confinement, according to a 2016 report by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. 

The new law is being sold as a money-saver.

Abandoning transitional supervision aligns with Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ disputed opinion that reduced prison populations during the Obama administration are to blame for a small uptick in violent crime. As a senator from Alabama, Sessions led the charge two years ago against a bill to ease sentences, and as attorney general he has instructed prosecutors to be more aggressive in charging defendants.  

Steve Sailer attributes that "small uptick" to his "Late Obama Age" collapse thesis: BLM rioting and the subsequent retreat of police forces in affected municipalities led to increases in murder rates, citing its localization in places like Baltimore and Ferguson. Jeff Sessions has been blaming soft law enforcement leaving too many criminals on the street. Certainly the overall effect of the Obama administration was to keep as many criminals out of jail as possible while riling them up with demagogy about police brutality.

But his draconian ideas are undermining his own boss’ stated preference for early release and rehabilitation programs. President Donald Trump has endorsed the First Step Act, which would let prisoners earn significant time to finish their sentences in halfway houses or home confinement if they complete certain rehabilitation programs. The bill is awaiting a Senate vote. Trump has said that he would “overrule” Sessions if the attorney general tried to stymie efforts to reform the criminal justice system.

Criminal justice reform as envisioned by the new bill seeks to get people out of prison earlier and out of halfway houses and into home detention earlier. Predictable problems arise from putting convicts too early into transitional

This reversion to Obama-era policies will impact public safety.

Since the 1960s, halfway houses have provided federal prisoners a running start before release to find work, which has been shown to help people stay crime-free longer. A Pennsylvania state study found connections between higher rearrest rates and stints in halfway houses, while federal violations, violence and overdoses have contributed to poor public perception of the facilities. But prisoners and their advocates say moving into a transitional residence gives inmates an incentive to avoid trouble in prison and join rehabilitative programs. 

Under the Obama administration, the number of federal prisoners in halfway houses and other transitional programs boomed. The federal government required the privately-run residences to provide mental health and substance abuse treatment, and the Department of Justice also increased access to ankle monitors so more prisoners could finish sentences in their own homes. 

At the peak in 2015, more than 10,600 prisoners resided in federal halfway houses. The number of inmates in home confinement—4,600—was up more than a third from the year before. In all, one in 14 of the people under Bureau of Prisons supervision was living at home or in a halfway house.

If you fall victim to a crime take solace: the event is tangible evidence of lower incarceration rates!

Life of Becky

The left's current campaign against white women for not voting as a leftist block (for policies hostile to them as white people) looks like just another Current Year escalation, but feminism and black civil rights have been in real conflict the whole time.

The suffragettes of course were progressive "racists" whose reputations are already being taken down just as the centennial of the 19th Amendment approaches--their statues are slated for removal before going up. They argued from a white supremacist point of view: giving the vote to a black man before giving it to a white woman was an outrage.

With the inclusion of sex as a protected category in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the creation of the initially weak Equal Employment Opportunity Commission began the transformation of the women's rights movement into one modeled entirely on black civil rights, treating sex as a class no different than race.

Including sex as a protected class was offered by Virginia Democrat and Rules Committee chairman Howard W. Smith as a sort of troll, thinking to sink it:

The Southerners’ plan was to delay a vote, in the hope that violent protests would lead to a white backlash. Smith promised to drag out hearings on the bill. But in January, 1964, he was threatened with a discharge petition—a measure, rarely used, to bring legislation out of committee against the wishes of the chairman—into releasing it for debate. It was during that debate that he introduced, on February 8, 1964, the sex amendment.

The amendment was a one-word addition, “sex,” to Title VII of the bill, which prohibited employers from discriminating on the basis of “race, color, religion, or national origin.” Opponents of Smith’s amendment, led by Emanuel Celler, of Brooklyn, the seventy-five-year-old chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and the bill’s floor leader, regarded it as either a prank intended to expose the limits of liberal egalitarianism or a poison pill that would make the bill more difficult to pass in the House, which had twelve female members, and impossible to pass in the Senate, which had two.

Opponents of civil-rights legislation had offered the sex amendment before. In 1950, Congress debated the resurrection of the Fair Employment Practices Committee, which had been created by Roosevelt to ban discrimination by government contractors, but which, after the war, under the leadership of Smith and Richard Russell, of Georgia, Congress had shut down. A Florida congressman, Dwight Rogers, proposed adding “sex” to the list of categories to be protected from discrimination. The House adopted the amendment, and the bill died in the Senate. 

If Smith’s amendment was a prank, it backfired. The House accepted it by a “teller” vote (that is, a head count) of 168 to 133. Most of the yeas were reported to have been Republicans and Southern Democrats. Johnson and Robert Kennedy were firm about minimizing changes to the bill after it reached the Senate, and although there were some alterations, the ban on discrimination by gender stayed in. On July 2nd, it became law.

Historians don't agree Smith was insincere in offering the amendment; he was a longtime confederate of radical suffragist Alice Paul and supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment. Hugh Davis Graham in "The Civil Rights Era":

The courtly Virginian, however, was also curiously sincere in his unlikely feminist egalitarianism. He had been a Congressional sponsor of the Equal Rights Amendment since as far back as 1945--almost as far back as he had been a scourge of [] FEPC. Ever since then he had maintained loose political ties with the National Women's Party...founded in 1913 in the suffragist campaign under the aggressive leadership of Alice Paul... 

..For forty years the NWP's campaign for the ERA was opposed by vintage Democrats like Eleanor Roosevelt and Emanuel Celler, largely because it threatened their proud legacy of progressive legislation to protect women in the workplace...

The ERA would have negated laws designed to protect women from exploitation in the workplace which included limiting the hours they can work (as Title VII has anyway). The "courtly" Judge Smith was also a friend of business. Virginia's textile mills employed a lot of women and were interested in anything that made it easier to employ them.

Granting women equal employment rights, as with the vote, had secondary effects on the racial dynamic, and Smith's amendment was defended by firebrand women's libber Martha Gritffiths in racial terms:

Martha W. Griffiths of Michigan, who was the first woman to join the House Ways and Means Committee, led the bipartisan and ideologically strange fight for the Smith Amendment. Griffiths was a warrior who took no prisoners; she declared that "a vote against this amendment today by a white man is a vote against his wife, or his widow, or his daughter, or his sister... 

...It would be incredible to me that white men would be willing to place white women at such a disadvantage," Griffiths said. Under the bill as reported, "you are going to have white men in one bracket, you are going to try to take colored men and colored women and give them equal employment rights, and down at the bottom of the list is going to be a white woman with no rights at all."

But the ancient, stubborn female rage we're seeing expressed through, among other things, the #metoo movement, was showing itself as well:

Katherine St George, a genteel Republican from Tuxedo Park, New York, hurled defiance in the teeth of her male colleagues: "We outlast you. We oultive you. We nag you to death. So why should we want special privileges?" "We want this crumb of equality," she said, "to correct something that goes back, frankly, to the dark ages."

We haven't even named the primordial rage we've unleashed with women's liberation. But it's real.

Her  Republican Colleague, Catherine May of Washington, was a less strident petitioner, yet quaintly echoed the sentiments of the NWP: "I hope we won't overlook the native-born American woman of Christian religion."

No. We'll just name her Becky and set loose the hounds.

White Women Wantonly Whiting

Via Steve Sailer, the Twitter account for feminist advocacy group "Women's March":

"White women gonna white" appears to be a theme. From the organization's website:

We are outraged. We are organized. They forgot that 5 million women lit the world on fire two years ago. On January 19, 2019, we’re going to remind them when we flood the streets of Washington, D.C., and with sister marches in cities across the globe. Save the date: The #WomensWave is coming, and we’re sweeping the world forward with us.

Fire and flood. Sweeping the world forward on a wave of menopausal discharge. You can pretend to notice nothing (not noticing things is a Current Year survival skill we have all developed--without noticing) but the imagery is unavoidable.
I'm reminded of another unintentionally sinister slogan (sorry ladies, the logo is taken):

Cover the earth grrrls.

A google search for "white women" of course turns up more of the same. White women are letting the side down, perpetually:

Twitter:

...

EXT. TYPICAL SMALL TOWN MAIN STREET, CIRCA 1962, DAY

A malt shop with a young soda jerk wearing white apron and hat out front, sweeping the sidewalk; next door a pair of old men lounge out in front of a barber shop, chewing the fat; kids race down the street on bicycles, a pet dog joyfully in pursuit; a young couple moving down the sidewalk filly back and forth flirtatiously. It is a beautiful day. The camera pulls back and pans over to a sparrow which has alighted on a nearby branch. The sudden, rude intrusion of the distinctive sound of several Harley Davidsons sends the bird to flight. Refocusing into the distance we see scores of bikers streaming into the town.

A SERIES OF QUICK CUTS THROUGH SEVERAL CLOSE SHOTS

The soda jerk looking over his shoulder at the sound;
The old timers, one lowers his pipe, the other reaches for his glasses as they turn toward the commotion;
The dog that was chasing the children, stops and looks, gives a yelp and scurries off;
The young couple turns to look, the girl drawing in close to her boyfriend.

ORIGINAL SHOT

Now a biker gang fills the street, a horde of modern day Visigoths pouring into the town center on their choppers raising a cloud of dust. The racket grows, drowning out everything in a bone rattling commotion. The bikers start to park their bikes with disciplined precision, two and three at a time pulling up to and gently backing up against the curb, each giving a defiant, noisy twist or two of the throttle before shutting down.

CLOSE SHOT, THE LEADER OF THE GANG

He is forty-something, wearing an old leather bomber’s helmet. Removing his goggles he reveals heavy, weather beaten slits for eyes. A misshapen nose bears an old scar across its bridge. He scans back and forth, with the air of someone who's about to devour a meal. He gets up from his bike and turns away, revealing his "colors", stitched across the back of his weatherbeaten cut-off denim vest, reading:
UNTETHERED

memento

Memento
June 7, 2008

Memento, n.; A hint, suggestion, token, or memorial, to awaken memory; that which reminds or recalls to memory; a souvenir.
[1913 Webster]

I thought to capture my history but was surprised to find it won't stay put; I'm not sure I recognize it. Sometimes it's a faint image, like a 3-D hologram, shimmying and wavering. I reach for it and it flickers out as my hand passes through. I don't know if it isn't just a composite of experience real and imagined, some mine, some stolen from others, some culled from the commons of humanity. There are those moments we all have, of sudden temporary displacement, wherein we do not recognize our surroundings, the life that sprung up around us, that is to say moments when we do not recognize ourselves. These leave behind the residue of doubt.

I'm having trouble neatly separating the experience from the flotsam trapped in the recesses and eddies of my mind, from the residue still building up about the edges of the endless stream of electronic illusion passing through even now. The sticky fragments of no particular relevance left behind in no sensible order. I can no longer clearly demarcate the boundary between the real and the representational. I see now I never really could. Did I live this life? Perhaps I saw it all on TV.

Nothing is stranger than to look in one's past and ask: did this happen? Am I that child, connected to the present by a series of heart beats? How in the hell can this all be? How can this world be real? All this time spent no more than a blip; inconsequential, yet everything I know.
The truth is a tear of mercury that resists containment. It cannot be seen head-on or appreciated in full. It will not be drawn in from the periphery. We are all reduced to furtive voyeurs of our own lives in the end. Your history is that light smudge in the corner of your eye, that flits away when you look in its direction.
I haven't done anything here, after all. Skirting the issue always; the story of my life, of all our lives, of humanity. All this supposed revelation just circling the periphery like a basketball "rimming out." Nothing.

The real journey I will not make.
Or maybe not. Maybe we all make that journey within, the only real journey there is, eventually. Maybe that's what death is. Going home. The incoherent babble of death's delirium is the purging, surrendering energy back into the ether, in waves of language by way of dissipating will, a chemical reaction rendering our identities inert and final. Only after it can no longer be known, only after it is lost is it made whole; only then does it lose its contingent nature and become complete.
This, this is all just stalking, lurking about outside the fortress of reality in the forest of illusion.
No: illusion is the fortress, reality the forest. As it should be.

The World on Wednesday

As I write a shouting mob is assembled outside of Tucker Carlson's house, the same group that chased Ted Cruz out of a restaurant, all arranged via a Twitter account that remains very much active.

Journalists haven't been entirely safe on the streets around antifa, and those of Carlson's stature have almost entirely ignored it to feign fear of Trump's jackboots and the fascist thunder-on-the-horizon that are those rally chants.

But this seems an escalation for antifa, direct, organized harassment of a journalist critic. Note, or not, what's the point, the standard left/right double standard. In ignoring this (I'm going way out on a limb in assuming Fox's competitors' coverage will be cover for the left, to the extent it will be covered at all) the media will be complicit.
It's so much a dereliction of journalistic duty it constitutes assent.

Meanwhile in Portland internecine leftist drama continues to entertain.

Self-described "copwatchers" who film the police on the street are a motley segment. There's one specific type, the pot-bellied middle-aged hippy with an ironclad zeal. They give no moral quarter to police or their defenders, and by "defenders" I mean anyone who doesn't think their local police should be disbanded and/or jailed.

They will descend on you with their camera phones if they find you suspicious--as happened to me once. I've seen the same type descend on a hapless deliveryman at City Hall, as if all taxpaying citizens are fair game--and they should be, somewhat, by the copwatchers' determination that law enforcement is murder. I mean, we're all paying for it. Copwatchers look like they don't, but I'm sure as a group they have to be similarly compromised, if less.

Another type of copwatcher is the young and unbalanced type looking for excitement. They are no less zealous, no closer to reason.

Today the Mayor praised last night's peaceful protest, a march celebrating the passage of an initiative--a positive message for once. But it wasn't entirely peaceful, when an aggressive local copwatcher (who says he's been arrested 16 times) responds to withering SJW irony with a genuinely impressive left- right-hook combination before indulging his well-earned rant against Portland, the Police and the pussies.




Source: Brandon Farley

Tomorrow the city council (cue television commercial voice-over: "now with more Diversity!" after the elections), exhausted from the serial encounters between Vancouver Washington's Proud Boys affiliated Patriot Prayer provocateurs and the always-down locals will consider limits on public protests in the city:

The Portland City Council is scheduled to have a public hearing on an ordinance at Mayor Ted Wheeler's request Thursday that would place new restrictions on protests in the city.
The proposal, dubbed the Protest Safety Ordinance by Wheeler's office, is a direct response to the many political demonstrations that have devolved into violent street clashes in the last two years, which have caused injury and property damage and drawn unfavorable attention to Portland.
If adopted, Wheeler would be allowed broad powers over when and how people may speak their minds in public. He could order demonstrators to restrict the length of a rally and order it be held at a specific place. He could limit movement within a zone of the city. And he could order public buildings be closed to curtail protesters' access to high-up vantage points, given worrying use of a public parking garage rooftop by armed protesters in August. Violators would be subject to arrest and fines.
Wheeler could order the restrictions only under certain circumstances, including if protesting groups have a history of violence, or if there is a "substantial likelihood of violence" at a planned protest, according to a draft of the ordinance.