We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
One of the issues I've been grappling with during all the recent nonsense is the idea, somehow, the U.S. is 'flawed'. In this article, Dr. Benedict Beckeld discusses what is best described as 'self-hatred' or fear of the familiar, oikophobia, as it relates to the U.S.
Sure, of course our nation is flawed. Those flaws are, in a way, our best feature, because they require constant discussion. Our Constitution memorialized free speech to ensure that discussion takes place. A friend asked if we're racist. Answering 'Yes' would imply everyone is racist and all our institutions are racist. So the only answer is 'No'. What IS true is we're more open about the racism which still exists. We show it, we talk about it on the news, we deplore it even as we work our way through it. Our dirty laundry is regularly on display for the world. Other nations either suppress their discussions, or are heterogeneous enough that racism isn't an issue they need to deal with too much. That allows them to judge us, and their judgments reach people in the U.S. and resonates. There is a strange self-loathing which sometimes accompanies wealth and success.
If we, as a nation, have a detrimental flaw, it's the hatred of what we are and what we've accomplished, and engaging that self-loathing. To that end, I can never be a leftist, let alone a Democrat. I hear too much about hate from them. They hate Trump, they hate what the U.S. represents, they hate our history, they ignore our accomplishments, somehow assuming these accomplishments rationalize the errors of our past. Accomplishments don't rationalize anything, they're just accomplishments.
Some of our citizens just need to learn to stop hating themselves. They need to learn to love our history with all its mistakes, and by default, our nation again. We have fixed so many mistakes. Why focus only on errors? We build on our successes, we don't build by focusing on failures. We can use the failures to improve, if we approach them constructively.
P.S. - I was sharing thoughts with a friend about what binds us as a nation. It is the Constitution, from my perspective. I know most of the people I referred to in this post, if they hate the U.S. and what it stands for, then they hate the Constitution. But the Constitution is, still today, an astounding and outstanding achievement. It does not grant rights, it protects them. Its amendments attempts to enumerate some of these rights, but makes it clear those listed are not all there are. This is very different than almost every other nation's basis. From this point of view, we are very much a nation, since the right to oppose, or hate, the Constitution is enshrined in the Constitution itself.
City politicians are covering themselves in shame in the current crisis. Take this loony tweet from City Councilman Mark Levine (D-Manhattan): “If there is a spike in coronavirus cases in the next two weeks, don’t blame the protesters” but rather “racism” and the NYPD: “Police are increasing covid risk by using tear gas and putting people in crowded jails.”
Let’s all pretend a Republican now serves as mayor of Minneapolis rather than for one day out of the last 59 years. Let’s all pretend Democrats do not enjoy a political monopoly over every big city plagued by the worst violence. Let’s all pretend white supremacists and Nazis and Russians destroyed American cities rather than the people who vote for the people saying white supremacists and Nazis and Russians destroyed American cities. Let’s all pretend that one cop’s inhumanity indicts the entirety of law enforcement but many activists’ violence says nothing about the protests.
New York City, the home of finance capitalism, has a Communist mayor! He was the ultimate luxury good for the so-called “progressive” virtue-signaling rich. But now that things are serious the costs of Mayor de Blasio’s luxury leftism are obvious. Between the excessive and incompetent coronavirus shutdown and now the riots, New York City has been set back 40 years. Even Gov. Andrew Cuomo can see it...
And just like that, it became clear that the national torture of three years of the Russian collusion investigation simply should not have occurred. The problems were myriad. In Rosenstein’s words, the FBI “was not following the written protocols, and that significant errors appeared in applications.” What has emerged from the recent inspector general’s report and this testimony is that the Obama administration’s efforts to investigate and prosecute Trump administration officials wasn’t based on facts, but negligence or malice.
Riots are not good persuasion and will not get you a job. Scott lost three promotions in his business career because he was a white male but he'd love to be helpful if somebody told him how. (brilliant podcast) "Not a f-ing corporation in America is looking to hire a white person."
Or stay out of trouble and learn a trade. He tells it like it is.
I agree that doing things for other people is a foundational life strategy. Never expect gratitude, though. People resent helpfulness because it makes them feel helpless. It is complicated.
CNN last week, "How are we going to stop these sunbathers on California beaches?!!!" CNN this week, "Masses in the streets walking arm in arm. Good for them."
Once the violence began, any effort to “understand” it should have stopped, since that understanding is inevitably exculpatory. The looters are not grieving over the stomach-churning arrest and death of George Floyd; they are having the time of their lives. You don’t protest or mourn a victim by stealing oxycontin, electronics, jewelry, and sneakers.
Unfortunately, we have yet to reach the bottom of that curve when we pass from epidemic to endemic stage, meaning a continuing small but steady number of cases and deaths. But it’s coming. Meanwhile, we still have time to rise to the occasion, to show sanity and sobriety. To reveal what The Great Emancipator called “the better angels of our nature.”
This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or exercise their revolutionary right to overthrow it.~Abraham Lincoln 1st inaugural address
This morning, watching the news, I simply told my son "never join a mob." The police can't win in a situation like this. If they do nothing and people get hurt, businesses and homes are destroyed. If they do something, a video will call out the 'bad cops'.
There's nothing to be gained in a mob. You get to be part of a crowd, and sure that's 'fun'. You're in with the 'in crowd'. But when it all goes south, you stand a chance of getting arrested or worse.
I hope we can all agree what happened to George Floyd, and many others like him, was unnecessary and requires action. I hope we can all agree peaceful protests of this kind of thing are useful and necessary as part of our nation's traditions. I'm sure we can all agree riots and destruction are counterproductive and unnecessary. They do not represent a revolutionary movement.
I've seen many people making comparisons of the looting and riots to the Boston Tea Party. This is just nonsense. While it's true that John Hancock and Samuel Adams were happy to see the tea tossed because it kept prices on their smuggled tea high, many others opposed the Tea Party, with Washington and Franklin calling for restitution to the East India Company. So criticism of destruction also has a long history in our fine nation.
That said, the East India Company existed by mandate of the Crown, and was an arm of the government. While it was 'private' in construct, even Parliament recognized it was both a political and economic entity. Taxes were only part of the way the Crown benefited from the East India Company. So any attack on the tea was an attack on the government, by default. Burning or looting Target stores are not an attack on the US government or local governments. The looting had nothing to do with depriving the government of anything, nor is it a statement about government. It's just violence and destruction for the sake of violence and destruction.
Taking the comparison further, the Boston Tea Party was not an uncontrolled riot. It was, by most accounts, generally orderly. Armed British ships did not make a move to intervene. The participants went so far as to sweep the decks clean afterward. This was not mob behavior. This is the kind of protest one should feel comfortable joining.
After being cooped up for 2 and half months, any spark was likely to result in an overreaction. Criminal elements love a protest, particularly one they can turn into a riot. Protests require strong leaders, soft guidance, and respect for order. But none of this exists with the 'protesters' in our current situation. There is no Martin Luther King here.
George Floyd should not be dead. His murderers should be arrested. The reaction is still wrong and cannot be justified. Each is a separate crime in itself. The riots should not be linked to Floyd's death, they should be linked to violent thugs seeking to cause problems.
... it’s simply not true that black men have no power and are always victims, not even when some creepy white woman tries to make them victims. Society was not on Amy Cooper’s side and it’s not on the side of the cop who kneeled on George Floyd’s neck either. That’s not to say that all is well and we should just move on. But some recognition of the fact that this is not being shrugged off by most white people seems appropriate if we’re going to have this conversation.
As a general rule, when the New York Times, the Washington Post, National Public Radio, Public Broadcasting Service, NBC, CBS, ABC, MSNBC, and CNN begin to parrot a narrative, the truth often is found in simply believing just the opposite.
We find 3 new hires for every 10 layoffs caused by the shock and estimate that 42 percent of recent layoffs will result in permanent job loss. Our survey evidence aligns well with anecdotal evidence of large pandemic-induced demand increases at some firms, with contemporaneous evidence on gross business formation, and with a sharp pandemic-induced rise in equity return dispersion across firms. After developing the evidence, we consider implications of our evidence for the economic outlook and for policy responses to the pandemic. Unemployment benefit levels that exceed worker earnings, policies that subsidize employee retention, occupational licensing restrictions, and regulatory barriers to business formation will impede reallocation responses to the COVID-19 shock.
In the rush to care for patients with COVID-19, are we forgetting the millions of victims of government shutdowns?
Some random estimates are that up to 1/3 of American small businesses will go bankrupt or completely out of business. Sounds as extreme as 2.2 million deaths, but we'll see. That's the heartbeat of America. Not to mention suicides and substance abuse with broken hopes and dreams.
"They" offered 2 weeks of shutdown - almost national - to "flatten the curve." People went along with that, although it really was appropriate mainly to NYC and the NY metro area. Whether that worked or not we'll never know, but viruses pass through and curve down anyway. It is their natural course so no policy can take much credit for that.
What ensued is that the goalposts moved, and keep moving. We can pray for the dead and their families, but let's remember the lives destroyed by COVID hysteria. In the end, if there is an end, that could be more people and more despair.
Somebody needs to write the book. If I had the time, the ability to write snappy prose, and the research energy that I had in college, I would do it. Right now, I am trying to keep our business on life support. I am not optimistic.
Rebellion against governors’ irrational and unscientific shutdown orders is growing across the country. As we have noted before, the revolt is especially strong in rural areas. What is striking is how sane and thoughtful the critiques from red America are, compared with the submissive hysteria that dominates most urban areas.
Those who talk of governments “following the science,” “acting on the science,” most of whom could not give a coherent account of the science of anything, are like dogs who yap because the other dogs are yapping.
Besides deaths, there were also doomsday projections about hospital capacity, but those models also proved to be grotesquely exaggerated. On March 29, Columbia University projected a need for 136,000 hospital beds in New York City. The maximum ever used was under 12,000. At peak, New York City still had around 1 in 6 hospital beds open and around 1 in 10 ICU beds open. Hospitals had capacity, both in New York City and in Sweden.
What if Dr. Fauci was correct in the beginning, when he declared a nasty flu?
Riots and protests: 
The winner of the riots/protests 
Image via 
Image: I forget whence 
As Common Sense Returns to the Gender Debate,
The Maine Ship Captain