Portland Joins in

Protesters blocked off the street in front of Portland's Justice Center around 2AM and drew no police attention as a few dozen rallied and gave speeches.


One speaker managed to praise the Symbionese Liberation Army (kidnappers of Patty Hearst) and its philosophy (symbiosis, naturally, so we may "evolve"), the Black Guerilla Family prison gang and, almost losing the audience, Qanon:



The protest wasn't truly spontaneous, but this freestyle was:


Elsewhere the prevalence of white protesters suggests heavy Soros involvement. Portland protests are always disproportionately white antifa types already--and the organized, paid aspect of it probably higher--with relatively few genuinely wound up, angry blacks. You can see by the quality of speakers that the white organizers don't have a deep well of talent when recruiting black "leaders". So here there's no pretense of spontaneity. But a genuine outpouring of black rage simply isn't possible here (alas), so the intensity and nature of our protests is evidence in itself of the manipulated nature of the Black Lives Matter campaign.

Witnessing their preparations last night with the usual forward unit of white kids setting up, seeing the antifa graffiti appear ahead of them, learning they were also returning to besiege the little ICE facility at the river: it's too much of the same script and too little of, frankly, genuine black rage (these speakers really do have to talk themselves into it sometimes, with the help of the white kids, of course) and the reports from elsewhere of antifa involvement leave me with little doubt this is all an orchestrated national action timed to coincide with our other crisis.

Evil is afoot.

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Drag Free Story Hour, Vol 4: Aghast From the Past

The series

Truth Juices and the American Wave

Another day, another diversity wonder mangling our cultural language. Ilhan Omar has come out against Joe Biden regarding Tara Reade's accusations.

'I do believe Reade,' Omar told Britain's Sunday Times newspaper over the weekend. 'Justice can be delayed, but should never be denied.' 

Omar has been exposed at some point to the phrase "justice delayed is justice denied", which is an expression of our legal principle of a right to a speedy trial.

(Ilhan probably wonders what all the fuss is about. In Somalia it takes five minutes to convict someone to death and they don't need no judge!)

 

Ol' Charlee Main he a very larned scholar...

Old Zip Coon is a very larned scholar, 
Old Zip Coon is a very larned scholar, 
Old Zip Coon is a very larned scholar, 
He plays on de Banjo Cooney in de holler. 

Joe Biden went on a podcast with someone who calls himself Charlemagne Tha God. When Charlie asked Joe if he would commit to picking a black female running mate Joe got himself into a bit of trouble by adopting black intonation and saying "if you ain't got Joe's back you ain't black";
pardon me, he didn't say it exactly like that, but my version is better because--are you listening Joe?--the dahkies really like rhymes.

A contrived controversy has ensued, and, per progressive modus operandi ("this just demonstrates the need for ____"), the whole thing is now being used to try and force a Biden commitment. President Kamala Harris here we come.

The interview wasn't contentious as all that, but interviewer Charlie later threw old Joe under the black bus in a rant that included this:

"The whole system needs to be dismantled and rebuilt and he's been a very intricate part of that system."

The word is integral, my brother. Joe Biden is no more intricate than any other human component of that "system"--he's actually been accused of being a little simple.

The minstrel shows featured a character called "Zip Coon", a dandy with intellectual pretensions and a steady stream of malaprops. Like "Jim Crow", the dandy who liked to dress up and chase women, we know in the enlightened Current Year these stereotypes have no basis in reality!

"Ah's never heard a yo Granma Lee...!" 

Damon Wayans adapted the character for the modern urban environment:



Joe Biden has a problem: he's looking to flip Trump voters at the same time he has to appease the blacks and get them out to the polls (get ready for all manner of BLM-style agitprop as November nears).
But the best way to flip Trump voters (after real economic populism, which isn't on the table) would be to have a Sista Souljah moment a la Bill Clinton:



Unfortunately we have progressed since then and now know disapproval of the genocidal impulses of black Americans leads to genocide. Or something.

Stacey Goodenhard

Stacey Abrams is the latest brightest star in the Democratic firmament. She and whoever is behind her are working hard to make her Vice President, one Joe Biden girl scout groping away from Leader of the Free World.

Abrams is angling to be the pantsuit Barack Obama, who vaulted to the presidency on a combination of hype and stealth: the media fawned over the potential First Black President and wanted nothing less than to take a closer look at his character or connections.

Stacey Abrams is no Barack Obama (of course Barack Obama is no "Barack Obama"--the numinous negro of legend) and we're not a pre-Obama America, having witnessed his betrayal of those lofty promises of racial healing and still sick with the anti-white passions he purposefully set loose.
Hope and Change.

Barack Obama not only betrayed his promise to bring the races together, he deliberately drove whites apart with considerable help from a friendly media--who deem it progress.

Now the same white dopes who voted for a black savior to bring us together pine for a black avenger to stick it to us--to us recalcitrant whites--after having been wound up by their would-be savior's demagogy. And not a one seems to notice this remarkable journey.

Maybe it's just that you can only lose your virginity once. Woke white America gave her maidenhead to a nice guy full of promises. He turned out to be a pimp. Too late to recover her virtue, now she's a slut. A slut for Justice.

It's a remarkable accomplishment to have conditioned a people to despise their selves and interests--as a badge of status for the intelligent and educated no less. Such a thing should be studied, examined, puzzled over; it should produce its own field of study. But it won't. It's a shame what should be an example productive of all manner of insight into human and social psychology will likely be lost to the obscuring kitsch of the coming order, which will cast it in stone as a second Enlightenment.

The point is Obama having already spent the unity trick isn't a hindrance to Abrams because she isn't playing it. Out of cunning or callowness, Abrams doesn't even humor the desire for racial unity. That's been exposed as a chimera and a ruse. Stacey's would-be re-ordering of our system around identity politics, as the culmination of the civil rights movement, is the endgame and Abrams only differs from her intellectual betters in her lack of discretion. She is welcome in that case. She's giving away the game: America is to be a multi-confessional empire divorced from its ethnic, national and constitutional origins.

Obama didn't fail to reconcile black and white America of course, he never intended that; he succeeded in discrediting reconciliation. He lured out America's longing for racial peace so he could smother it.
A world-historic dick move by a world-historic douche bag.


Stacey is the inevitable post-Obama black candidate--here to tell us how naive we were to believe him. She's made her focus "voter rights" and registration of non-white voters--she talks little policy and makes no pretense of having "ideas" or a guiding philosophy other than identity politics; she sells herself as a pragmatist willing to compromise everything except them.
Her Marxism is entirely cultural, thus corporate-friendly, no threat to finance and Kosher. She's literally made for the planned new America.

A presidential candidate who is  purely a race-advocate and little more, whose very mediocrity everywhere else is a virtue--to the powerful status quo--Stacey Abrams is the candidate of the future.

Abrams argued in her notorious Foreign Affairs piece praising identity politics that our resistance to identity politics is proof of their perpetual necessity:

The entrance of the marginalized into the workplace, the commons, and the body politic—achieved through litigation and legislation—spawned reactionary limits on their legal standing and restrictions meant to block their complaints and prevent remedies. The natural antidote to this condition is not a retrenchment to amorphous, universal descriptors devoid of context or nuance. Instead, Americans must thoughtfully pursue an expanded, identity-conscious politics. New, vibrant, noisy voices represent the strongest tool to manage the growing pains of multicultural coexistence. By embracing identity and its prickly, uncomfortable contours, Americans will become more likely to grow as one.

Even progressives complain she talks about herself ("telling her story" in the progressive sense) and electoral politics almost entirely. She has little interest in anything else. Abrams has two obsessions: herself and power.

We know less of her than we knew of Obama--despite their shared self-obsession. But she may have one thing on him--she probably wrote her black "romance-suspense" novels (as "Selena Montgomery") on her own:

Determined to prove herself, A.J. Grayson created an artificial intelligence that ends up commandeered by the ISA to use against the new monarch of Jafir. Damon Toca, Jafir's new king, owned a gallery just six months ago and now rules a country. A.J. and Damon come together to find out who wants Damon dead, and if they fall in love in the process, well, that's just a bonus...

Dr. Erin Abbot, a criminal psychologist, his happy with her quiet life in New Orleans until she discovers a serial killer is afoot. Gabriel Moss is a journalist that can sense Erin knows more than she's letting on. Still, he finds himself incredibly attracted to her. Together, they track a killer all while falling in love...

After an innocent woman is accused of murder, Fin Borders is forced to return to her hometown of Hallden and putting her life in danger. Special Agent Caleb Matthews is working undercover looking for the killer. Knowing he can't do everything alone, he seeks out Fin's help. It's then that the passion between them grows even as secrets are revealed...

Star Adams is a young Vice President who learns her boss touched a girl scout inappropriately. She and Secret Service agent Chad Brilliantine must find the girl before a white supremacist terrorist cell looking to protect the president, but their budding romance might get in the way...

Okay, that last one is mine.

The Daily Caller posted the naughty bits they found, and they suggest an author appreciative of female surrender, or maybe just power.

"With urgency, she accepted him, fascinated by the power, and for a moment, she wavered, wondering if she was prepared. In the next second, she knew she could never be..."

"Arousal, ravenous and craven, bent to a stronger, more fragile need that consumed her. She opened for him...."

“...his hands were on me and underneath my clothes...he went down my skirt, but then up inside it and he penetrated me with his fingers...he was kissing me at the same time and he was saying something to me...”

Sorry, that last one is Tara Reade's account of being jumped by Joe Biden. Stacey dismisses it--as fiction. Perhaps if Tara had told of her sweet surrender to his ravenous will Stacey would find the account credible. I suspect if she gets the VP nod and a doddering Joe Biden forgets himself and gets his finger stuck in a staffer she's going to find that account "credible" and "troubling". She might even help write it.

"I used to be a romance novelist, you know", she'll tell the assembled political ghouls plotting the coup.

Abrams is single, never-married and officially straight despite resembling a lesbian and surrounding herself with them.

She or may not be an intellectual or professional mediocrity--she's a cipher--but her ambition is definitely of a higher caliber, demonstrated when she took the unprecedented step of announcing her availability for the Vice Presidential nomination. A cowed or just disinterested press seemed to miss the audacity and boldness of publicly putting Biden on the spot and trying to force the nomination. The cravenness of it is jolting--and it might work, with Biden in the absurd position of "owing" his nomination to black America because they pulled his chestnuts out of the fire in South Carolina.

Things have degenerated in America. The old liberal press would have noted these things. The new woke press doesn't seem capable of discerning them. So Stacey's shortcut to 2024 (she's predicted, a la Ali, she'll get there by 2040) is looking scarily plausible.
But her hagiographers have a tough time of it.

Witness this Washington Post Magazine puff piece:

There is a big buzz at the Loudermilk Conference Center in downtown Atlanta as a gathering called Paradigm Shift 2.0: Black Women Confronting HIV, Health and Social Justice gets underway. Three hundred registered participants have journeyed from across the country to discuss the many challenges and possibilities facing black women and girls. The second day’s morning keynote was delivered by radical activist and professor Angela Davis. The hype has been building exponentially for lunchtime guest speaker Stacey Abrams.

When she is finally introduced the women shout and leap to their feet. Young women stand on chairs, camera phones flash. Abrams, who appears both amused and slightly disturbed by the fuss over her, takes control of the chaotic scene. I’ve witnessed this level of affection for very few political leaders in the Democratic circles I’ve been in since the 1980s. They have the last names Clinton (both Hillary and Bill), Sanders, Warren, Jackson and Obama (both Michelle and Barack).

“I’m going to make sure there is peace in this room,” Abrams says. “Y’all are about to annoy each other with these cameras, so I’m going to stand up and I’m going to stand in front of each group of you. Take pictures so you can put your camera down.”

(Dana Scruggs for The Washington Post)

Pandemonium ensues as she walks to the far left of the stage, like a runway supermodel, stops on a dime, poses, tilts her head slightly and smiles. Camera flashes explode. She next pivots and walks slowly to the center of the stage, freezes there and repeats the pose. Again, the flashes explode. Abrams is summoning her inner actress, and she is both enjoying the moment and getting through it to get to the conversation. She then pivots and walks to the far right of the stage, same. You wonder whether she has done this before, because it is not necessarily what one would expect from a 46-year-old politician who was nearly elected the first black female governor in U.S. history. She lost by fewer than 2 percentage points in the 2018 Georgia race riddled with allegations of voter suppression. Before that, she was a state legislator who had served as a leader in the Georgia General Assembly for a decade. Now her name is on political pundits’ shortlists of potential running mates for Joe Biden. She also happens to have predicted that she’ll be elected president by 2040.

In case you're wondering what a paradigm shift in black women's approach to AIDS looks like:

In the arts, ViiV Healthcare presented Take My Hand, a theatre piece about two women—one cisgender and one transgender—who are living and eventually loving with HIV. Through poetry, prose, and movement, they tell their stories and urge the audience to take a deeper look at their own. An interactive panel discussion followed the short play...

After Dylan Roof, Abrams, as minority leader in the Georgia House, declined to support a bill to remove the Stone Mountain monument to Confederate heroes.
Then Abrams runs for governor, and this happens:

 

So in defense of Stacey, she's no more radical than her (largely parenthetical) white benefactors demand. The perfect candidate for the elite, unprincipled about everything except power--hers. All else is negotiable.

"...cascades of desire shifted like paradigms from their lingering side-boobs..."

The weird puff pieces have been coming for a while; this is from 2016:

Resplendent in a red suit, Abrams gave a stirring speech about her passion for public service at the 2016 Democratic National Convention. "Growing up as the daughter of a librarian and a shipyard worker in Southern Mississippi, my family was hit time and again by the economic insecurity that is too often driven by racism, sexism, and the ills that come from being born in the wrong ZIP code," Abrams said. "Still, every day my parents taught us, all six of their children, to celebrate through service the grace that is America." 

Like Obama she obscures the embarrassing whiteness of her background, despite having been spared by caring parents from the chaos and ignorance of a black neighborhood:

“2020 South Street was a red-brick house with azalea bushes that ran along the front. There was an oak tree in the front yard, and it had such big limbs and so many leaves that grass couldn’t grow underneath it. But you could climb that tree, and you could see everything.” Abrams’s parents picked that street so that she and her siblings could attend one of the better schools in the area. It was one of many lessons she learned growing up about the division of resources along racial lines and navigating those divisions. “It was less a black community than we lived on a ‘black street.’ There were these two streets that were adjacent to the middle-class, predominantly white part of town to get zoned into the middle-class school. ... We lived on the two streets that were all black until the Brooks family came.

Not so alienated from black America as Barack Obama, who claimed to have spent time in black barbershops to learn to black (let no one say he hasn't suffered for his profession, an educated, intelligent man pretending to find the insipid patter of The Brothers meaningful--"why yes, Tyrone, your point about a full buttocks is--er, I mean, yo, tell it brother...").

When Abrams ran for governor she had to reveal she was a hundred and seventy thousand dollars in debt--mostly credit cards, with fifty thousand in back taxes. Someone has since paid that debt for her. What she owes to whom for this favor is just one more thing for the press to ignore while sending out gay black men to praise her pantsuit charisma.

Stacey doesn't owe the IRS any more, but we still owe her.

Hello darkness my old friend...

Love is the Virus

Christianity is the social and civilizational equivalent of an immunodeficiency.

SAS-2020

(from a comment thread on Sailer's about Sweden's Covid strategy; I thought I'd share it here as a short post)

We on the right are heavily invested in hating Sweden and are anti-lockdown–the whole thing is less and less about the health crisis and more a fight over what’s left after the apocalypse (phony or not) as we progress.
We’re in the two-buttons-meme-state.

A new virus emerges. Severe Acute Swede-bashing, SAS-2020. Symptoms include hyperventilating, sweating and Tourette’s-like outbursts about “rape gangs” and “socialism”. Xers and Millennials most at risk.

Social distancing is advised here, too.

stream

Douche Thrills

Covid appears to be settling in for the long haul, so there will be no decent interval observed before full resumption of clown-world identity politics (no social distancing for social justice, alas), as we've seen with the budding Ahmaud Arbery hoax. I suspect that, as after 9/11, it will come back with a vengeance.

Comparing Covid with 9/11 is a good measure of the extent of our disintegration as a nation; briefly after the latter there was a sense that we would finally come together as a nation. Now that initial moment of unity, false or not, isn't even possible.

We were collectively faced with a threat from without, a la President Reagan's cold war era "alien invasion" scenario and I thought I sensed even in liberals the hope it would end the misguided direction of American "civil rights"--just as they once hoped AIDS would calm our sexual chaos.

(We see how that all fared now.)



The press seized on this speech as further proof of Reagan's bumptiousness. Sadly their mockery has been borne out by 9/11 and now Covid; Reagan was naïve. But the very cynicism with which his statement was met is the same that renders it naïve: even an alien invasion would not dilute their disdain for Reagan and those he represents.

That cynicism still defines our politics. The same class mocking Reagan now hangs on every Trump utterance for no reason other than to sink him, finally. They were right about Reagan, but his naivete was the lesser part to their malice.

If alien invaders ever showed up, you can bet they'll be met upon landing by a contingent looking to ally with them in their fight against white supremacy and patriarchy (there's a story idea).

Like General Casey fretting our marvelous diversity might end up in a pool of blood like Major Hasan's victims, some are now saying it would be a shame to conquer Covid only to strengthen the patrarchy:

And yet, even these lifelong battles for a place in science have left us unprepared for the gendered and racial inequalities we have experienced in the response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The worst impacts of the coronavirus will undoubtedly be the loss of lives, the collapse of economies, the disruption of humanitarian aid and the decay of democracies. But we fear that the hard-won progress for women in science will be collateral damage of this crisis.

In the spirit of generosity I went looking for something I could agree with in the above piece. Maybe this:

…men’s voices are being amplified over expert women because they have been identified through informal male networks, or have blustered their way in to social media and TV interviews and are therefore perceived as “high profile”.

Okay. now we're on to something. I think we can appease this woman. How about if we get rid of this guy?

Maybe the girls just need to work on their hair more.

The lady-doctor complaining the crisis is shaking up her field, causing some to distinguish themselves and others to fall out along predictably disparate lines, is ironically complaining that nature (in the form of Covid) is making a mockery of her socially constructed equality in the natural sciences.

Toqueville would recognize it for what it is:

"Nature secretly avenges herself for the constraint imposed upon her by the laws of man."

The uncomfortable implication of seeing nature avenge herself for diversity in the present crisis is that it must always be wringing out its vengeance, less dramatically but society-wide, in our environment of imposed diversity and equity.

And as Covid and the attendant economic depression progress and less and less mediocrity and waste is sustainable, we can expect many more of these laments, on behalf of a variety of groups finding their uselessness suddenly exposed.

Nothing is ever all bad. They might even lose.

"Time is on their side, yes it is..."

The one thing the layman can trust is he can't trust the experts. Because they don't trust him.

Experts, if they aren't fake or paid shills, come with a particular professional bias as well as the general contemporary bias by which Western elites are alienated from the common man.

There's a pattern crises follow now: campaigns of misinformation, opportunistic looting by financial actors, the consolidation of power in the hands of the people who as often as not are responsible, and ending with society's energies diverted to a cause with little or no relationship to the original crisis. A cause to which the people themselves may have no relationship or interest--the 2003 Iraq War is a stark model.

The first significant action taken in the current crisis (as opposed to significant inaction) was a campaign of misinformation. Faced with the very real prospect of a run on medical-quality face masks the experts lied to us about their effectiveness.

It's not their fault, you might say; fault the outsourcing of the manufacture of basic medical equipment. But that misinformation campaign about masks was nestled like a Russian doll in a greater misinformation (or just mis-informed) campaign--that our hospitals would be overwhelmed with corona virus patients.

How many lives were lost to this? How much time was lost? Might we have avoided the shutdown and the coming economic depression if we had a system capable of honest action in the public interest?

Squint through the snowstorm of information and look into the heart, such as it is, of the elitist: aside from his objective appraisal of the current crisis (leaving aside his atrophied capacity for objectivity in the Current Year) what about the shutdown appeals to him, emotionally? He sees it as a crude device for a crude people--us. Faced with the prospect of formulating a set of rules for going about life and business or just telling the dumb bastards (us) to stay home, they opted, of course, for the latter.

They want you to "shelter in place" because they don't trust you to carry out basic instructions.

Common to all crises now is the absence of accountability. Let's not expect it. But it's becoming increasingly suggestive the still-touted strategy of shutting down is misguided and may even be counterproductive:

...numerous epidemiological studies have shown that infection rates for C19 are higher when people are exposed to it for prolonged periods in confined spaces. Locking people up in their homes is probably the worst thing you could do if you wanted to reduce the infections and the duration of the outbreak.

This is well known to the World Health Organisation. In their joint study with Chinese authorities, published in February, the WHO stated that airborne spread wasn’t reported for C19 and was not considered to be a method of transmission.

They found that most infections occurred within families where the chance of infection was as high as 20%. However, the chance of infection in the community was estimated to be between 1-5%.

The elite's reaction to the crisis was delayed and dishonest; so will be any reaction to the present strategy failing--recognition of which censorship will delay as long as it can. The media can be expected now to portray the inevitable waning of the pandemic as a vindication of the shutdown. This too will delay any abandonment of the strategy.

But for other reasons they are in no hurry. The shutdown hurts the little people, for whom it is crafted. It's like a flood threatening to leave only the commanding heights above water.

The shutdown strategy retains the support of the experts, so the typical bugman can enjoy the disparate impact it has on the middle and working classes without feeling guilty. Indeed, he unthinkingly plugs it directly into his psychological matrix of understanding: it is a case of us dummies ignoring "science" and valuing "jobs" over "lives".

That it accelerates the dis-empowering of certain people is inevitable, he might say (not that anyone is asking) like globalization and white decline.

Whatever the case, if wealth and cultural status are to remain wildly uneven in the favor of those in charge, the shutdown will have to be uniform across the country.

Why, you might ask, would Bakersfield, with its dearth of cases, have to observe the same drastic measures as Manhattan, and go down the drain of economic decline?

Because if New York, with its vast importance to the status quo we call Globo Homo, is to be shut down for months (because it's acquired a nasty virus, as a result of being the center of Globo Homo) then by God so must the rest of the nation. We can't have people and business, the very power, of New York migrating out to the hinterlands! Therefore a crude strategy must become cruder still.

Meanwhile some people are doing extremely well in the current atmosphere. The Daily Mail:

American billionaires are enjoying multi-million dollar increases to their net worth as the country's unemployment levels rise to record highs amid the coronavirus lockdowns
Eight 'pandemic profiteers' have seen their net worth surge by over $1billion each since the start of the global pandemic. 

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, 56, has added $25billion to his own wealth since January 1, 2020, as the company's staff protest their poor working conditions and he makes a return to the company's day-to-day running. 

According to a report from the Institute for Policy Studies, American billionaires added $282billion – nearly a ten percent increase – to their combined wealth between March 18 and April 10, as the U.S. unemployment rate approached 15 percent

Time is on the side of the powerful.

For some reason I flashed on this scene from the film Creepshow



Our elite is betting they can hold their breath a long, long time.

Playing Chicken with the Global Elite

The powers that be have determined the shutdown hurts you (evil white middle class America) more than it hurts them. Thus the increasingly partisan debate over shutdowns.

I wanted to argue there's a cost in mortality to such as the depression we're foisting on ourselves. But apparently it isn't that clear-cut. In 2009 researchers went looking for presumed increased mortality during the Great Depression (as I just did in finding them), but instead found that

 Population health did not decline and indeed generally improved during the 4 years of the Great Depression, 1930–1933, with mortality decreasing for almost all ages, and life expectancy increasing by several years in males, females, whites, and nonwhites. For most age groups, mortality tended to peak during years of strong economic expansion (such as 1923, 1926, 1929, and 1936–1937). In contrast, the recessions of 1921, 1930–1933, and 1938 coincided with declines in mortality and gains in life expectancy. The only exception was suicide mortality which increased during the Great Depression, but accounted for less than 2% of deaths. Correlation and regression analyses confirmed a significant negative effect of economic expansions on health gains. The evolution of population health during the years 1920–1940 confirms the counterintuitive hypothesis that, as in other historical periods and market economies, population health tends to evolve better during recessions than in expansions.

The last twenty years of economic expansion have been awful for white Americans generally and good for every one else. The White Death and declining white life expectancy alongside the growth in population (and malice) of non-whites have been its hallmarks.

Diversity's economic component is akin to a financialization scam, where clever bankers find some previously unmolested source of wealth--in this case the white middle class--and rationalize into existence some vehicle by which it is looted. Diversity and inclusion are as mortgage backed securities and junk bonds. They're also bubbles.

I still think it's probably naive to think a prolonged economic depression will be good for white America, considering the condition we're in approaching it and the fact we have no advocates, still. The increased mortality of the economic "good times" may simply be a result of so much more activity taking place; for one instance, there will be many more fatal accidents. Of course, there are certainly many more people working, and partying, themselves to death.

Nonetheless, while we should resist whatever "new normal" any bastard using the phrase intends for us, we should remember always--old normal was bad for us. And getting worse.

Hope rises.

When the masks go on, the Mask comes off

The Atlantic takes advantage of the present crisis to go all in:

Covid-19 has emboldened American tech platforms to emerge from their defensive crouch. Before the pandemic, they were targets of public outrage over life under their dominion. Today, the platforms are proudly collaborating with one another, and following government guidance, to censor harmful information related to the coronavirus. And they are using their prodigious data-collection capacities, in coordination with federal and state governments, to improve contact tracing, quarantine enforcement, and other health measures. As Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg recently boasted, “The world has faced pandemics before, but this time we have a new superpower: the ability to gather and share data for good.”

Civil-rights groups are tolerating these measures—emergency times call for emergency measures—but are also urging a swift return to normal when the virus ebbs... 

But the “extraordinary” measures we are seeing are not all that extraordinary. Powerful forces were pushing toward greater censorship and surveillance of digital networks long before the coronavirus jumped out of the wet markets in Wuhan, China, and they will continue to do so once the crisis passes. The practices that American tech platforms have undertaken during the pandemic represent not a break from prior developments, but an acceleration of them...

In the great debate of the past two decades about freedom versus control of the network, China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong. Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet, and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is compatible with a society’s norms and values.

Ironically if it's eventually decided by the right people the virus didn't originate in the wet markets of Wuhan this article will be arguing for its own censorship.

Author Jack Goldsmith argues for using the Covid response to make permanent and official the private sector's censorship of genuine dissent because of the fake news and Russian interference canards.

Goldsmith is author of another piece for the Atlantic, " The Cost of Trump’s Attacks on the FBI".
Yes, the same FBI recently exposed for framing General Flynn--in its attempt to get Trump. Not that anyone is paying attention, but the argument and source are laughable.

He goes on to cheer the privatization of censorship via information monopoly, acknowledging the long complaint of the censored right: of course, and it's a very good thing, now that the social media oligopoly is working together like one giant Ministry of Truth.

Lain aside as no longer necessary are the fallacious place-holder appeals, "if it isn't government it isn't censorship" and "build your own platforms"; already some feel safe not even pretending these were offered in good faith.

What in the effing hell is going on over at The Atlantic?

The Covid crisis is on track to end in a social and political catastrophe that will have little to do with the initial health crisis.

The Absolute State of Oregon

Reporting on the protests against Oregon governor Kate Smith's continuing coronavirus lockdown today May 2, 2020.

Drag-free Story Hour: A Boomer Tale

The Golden Years
a scene



Above is the first installment of my (hopefully) weekly story hour where I read an original work of fiction. Here I'm reading the story below, "Day of the Red Eye", so you don't have to!