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.
What has CHAZ (or is it CHOP? They grow up so fast!) done for us? CHAZ has done us a favor by highlighting some truths about the far left. 1. Borders are important, and knowing who you want to allow in, is important to them. 2. Gun ownership is a thing! 3. They have created walls 4. They are self-segregating, so diversity is a questionable value in a 'communal' society 5. Strong policing of the area is taking place...but just not 'the police' (meet the new boss, same as the old boss) 6. Deportations are common 7. Stealing is legitimate, particularly if you're taking land. 8. Freeloading is a legitimate means of support. The more 'free stuff' the better.
You imagine no doubt, gentlemen, that I want to amuse you. You are mistaken in that, too. I am by no means such a mirthful person as you imagine, or as you may imagine; however, irritated by all this babble (and I feel that you are irritated) you think fit to ask me who I am--then my answer is, I'm Roger Bosso.
“The Agency for years has developed and operated IT mission systems outside the purview and governance of enterprise IT, citing the need for mission functionality and speed,” the CIA observed. “While often fulfilling a valid purpose, this ‘shadow IT’ exemplifies a broader cultural issue that separates enterprise IT from mission IT, has allowed mission system owners to determine how or if they will police themselves.”
It's almost like the security services didn't want any oversight. I wonder what they were doing. On second thought, no I don't.
In amateur photos given to authorities, she is seen wearing a T-shirt that says, "Keep the immigrants, deport the racists." They were able to trace the T-shirt back to an Etsy shop, where a review was left by a user that displayed a Philadelphia location. Investigators say open searches for the username led them to a Poshmark user by the name of lore-elisabeth. Open searches for a Lore Elisabeth in Philadelphia led investigators to a LinkedIn profile for a woman who was employed as a massage therapist.
Lore has since left a one-star review of the food served at the Philly police lockup on Yelp.
Wirecard AG delayed the publication of its annual financial results for the fourth time after auditors were unable to find about 1.9 billion euros ($2.1 billion) in cash, causing analysts to question liquidity at the German payments firm. The shares collapsed.
Everybody calm down. The cleaning crew probably just removed one of the Post-It notes from Karen's screen, and she can't remember where she put the two billion without it. She'll remember eventually.
Connecting your phone to a car’s infotainment system is very helpful. By connecting, you can take calls, respond to texts, and get GPS directions without touching your phone. All of these features would have seemed magical just a decade ago. Even though these conveniences help drivers stay safe while driving, a new problem arises. What happens to your data after you connect your phone to the rental car?
Never mind my data. Can someone help me refold this Rand McNally map? I've been trying since 1987, and I still can't get it back in the glove box.
A newly discovered spyware effort attacked users through 32 million downloads of extensions to Google’s market-leading Chrome web browser, researchers at Awake Security told Reuters, highlighting the tech industry’s failure to protect browsers as they are used more for email, payroll and other sensitive functions.
As is usual with modern news stories, this one doesn't have a list of the offending extensions, or a link to find one. You know, information you could use.
Kearns may not have realized that his negative cash balance displaying on his Robinhood home screen was only temporary and would be corrected once the underlying stock was credited to his account. Indeed it’s not uncommon for cash and buying power to display negative after the first half of options are processed but before the second options are exercised—even if the portfolio remains positive.
Suicide: The permanent solution to your temporary problems.
This kind of thinking leads people to 2 year cycles. On most modern software teams, it takes roughly one year to really feel like you have your feet under you. By that time the kind of learning novelty people are used to isn’t there. By 16 months they’re restless. By 24 months they’re gone. This is a problem. It’s a problem because the majority of durable and transferable knowledge comes after achieving basic competency. Mastery of a skillset, understanding and learning from the outcomes of decisions made years ago, architecture and design, leading projects - these all come well after basic competency.
If Twitter, Facebook and other tech companies shift toward everyone working from home, it will mean less reliance on esprit de corps and morale to ensure performance, and more management using direct financial incentives and project- and output-based monitoring.
That's funny. Normal people call "direct financial incentives" wages. We call "output-based monitoring" work. We call "esprit de corps" bullsh*t. You'll get used to it, poindexters.
Among the issues catalogued at Electrek, on Reddit, and on YouTube channels are excessive road noise and alignment issues, rear hatches that don't close properly, charge port doors that don't close, misaligned doors and exterior trim, scratched body panels, substandard paint, underfloor panels that weren't fully attached to the car, dirty or damaged interiors, broken seat belts, and even rear seats that aren't actually attached to the rest of the car.
I guess this means that Tesla is finally a real car company, because that sounds just like a Chevy to me.
Video has emerged online that shows the remains of three AGM-114R9X missiles used in a recent strike on Al Qaeda-linked terrorists in Syria, providing the best look yet at the innards of this mysterious version of the venerable Hellfire, which has six pop-out sword-like blades in lieu of a traditional explosive warhead.
Cool. Will sharks with fricken laser beams attached to their heads go into production soon?
Well, there's today raft of nonsense. I hope you all enjoy a Thursday filled with cheap happiness or lofty suffering, whichever you prefer.
There are now only two kinds of people extant in the US. Let's call them Goofus and Gallant.
Goofus is currently vandalizing cemeteries and demanding that policemen carry ice cream cones instead of batons. Goofus doesn't know how he got that way, but he's constitutionally incapable of voluntarily cooperating with Western Civilization in any way, at least if he's told not to by his peers. He has no idea where his peers get their ideas. He thinks everyone but his peers are sheeple and deserve any ignominy he can heap on them. He'll lie, cheat, or steal at the drop of the hat, but he won't call it that. He'll use any form of justification necessary to go along with his friends. The sophistry might come first, or after the fact, but he's striking a blow for freedom all day, every day, by illegally downloading movies or burning a nunnery or anything in between. It's his opponents who are lawbreakers, even though they're not breaking any laws. They're not cool, and that's that.
Gallant, on the other hand, is constitutionally incapable of openly breaking any law. Gallant is wearing a surgical mask while driving alone in his car because dems the rules. No matter how stupid the rules are, he'll queue up to follow them. He's angry all the time about the laws, because they're in complete opposition to how he wants the world to be ordered. But the rule of law is at the top of his totem pole, and that's that. Every once in a while a Gallant hairdresser opens up her shop during a Goofus shitshow lockdown, and is exalted for her bravery, but one toe in the pool is not swimming.
Gallant thinks Goofus is off the hook right now, because cities are being burned to the ground, but Goofus really isn't. Goofus is performing in a very calibrated political Kabuki play, planned for him by people unseen. If you really took all the Goofuses off the hook, you'd see an army of Lavrentia Berias right quick. They're timid by nature but they're the people who run death camps if they get the chance.
Goofus accuses Gallant of being off the hook all the time, but of course that's silly. Gallant might be a combat veteran or a biker or a lumberjack or something similar. If he was off the hook you'd get Carthage, not placards waved outside the state capitol. Gallant is armed to the teeth, but he never shoots anybody because there's rules against that. He mutters about it under his breath constantly, but the total tonnage of nonsense he'll endure before losing his cool is nearly infinite. Nearly. It would take more than some defaced statue dedicated to a general who lost to get him to stop sorting his recyclables, never mind take to the barricades. Conservative presidents keep putting Gallants on the Supreme Court who say dems the rules so we have to follow them, no matter how nutty the rules are, for instance.
No one's going to ring a bell and tell Gallant the rules don't matter any more so let it rip on Goofus. No one is going to ring a bell and tell Goofus to make a frontal assault on Gallant, which would look like a synchronized swimmer turned welterweight punching Mike Tyson at the weigh in. Goofus thinks he has the upper hand right now because no one's stopping him, but he's being humored, nothing more. His minders are using him to get the upper hand. That's a different thing entirely. They'll get as far as they can with this nonsense, but eventually things will strike a new Overton equilibrium. Gallant will put up with kneeling to see his football game, and maybe notice a decided lack of stars and bars on race cars next year. He'll try to follow the new, very weird rules as best he can. Goofus will go back to handing out flyers from card tables in the park while normal people avert their eyes and scurry past.
Let's examine today's news items through the Goofus and Gallant prism:
On Monday, Walmart said it will open its online marketplace, which reaches 120 million monthly visitors, to Shopify's more than 1 million business clients. That means Walmart shoppers will be able to find goods from some Shopify merchants.
Goofus would rather die than shop at Walmart. Goofus loves the proletariat. It's people he can't stand, and people shop at Walmart. Gallant's wife shops on Etsy and at Costco because have you seen the way the proletariat dresses?
After publication of this story, Google backtracked Tuesday, clarifying that The Federalist had been warned about policy violations but still had time to address them. It now has three days to remove the violations before a ban goes into effect.
This is what Goofus' handlers are up to. Zero Hedge is low hanging fruit. Gallant works at the Federalist and is busy doing whatever Google tells them to. How else could they afford season tickets to the kneeling sessions at the Washington Indigenous Downtrodden People football games?
The robot is meant to be a flexible platform: Boston Dynamics has spent many years refining the hardware and software that give the robot incredible mobility, but attachments will help qualify Spot for specific jobs. A software development kit allows operators to further customize how the robot behaves and senses its world, incorporating computer vision models, for instance, to detect certain landmarks around a job site.
Goofus will continue binge-watching Westworld and wait for a robot girlfriend. Gallant has a Belgian Malinois that cost half that.
The feature, which will start rolling out on Wednesday, allows users to turn off political, electoral and social issue adverts from candidates and other organisations that have the "Paid for" political disclaimer. The company said it plans to make the feature available to all US users over the next few weeks and will offer it in other countries this autumn.
Everyone who works at Facebook is a Goofus and will gleefully charge Gallant for Trump ads that never get shown to anyone.
Martin Landray, Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology at the Nuffield Department of Population Health, University of Oxford, one of the Chief Investigators, said, ‘Since the appearance of COVID-19 six months ago, the search has been on for treatments that can improve survival, particularly in the sickest patients. These preliminary results from the RECOVERY trial are very clear – dexamethasone reduces the risk of death among patients with severe respiratory complications.
Goofus doesn't care as long as it's not quinine. Gallant doesn't care because he keeps his parents away from nursing homes run by Andrew Cuomo.
The foundry’s director of metallurgy, Elaine Thomas, 66, of Auburn, Washington, was charged criminally with one count of major fraud against the United States. Thomas, who worked in various capacities at the lab for 40 years, was due to make an initial appearance in federal court June 30. Her attorney, John Carpenter, declined to comment.
Goofus hopes the subs sink anyway. Gallant wants his money back. Submariners would like to take Elaine for a shakedown cruise. Strapped to the hull.
Biologist Kathy Niakan and her team at the Francis Crick Institute wanted to better understand the role of a particular gene in the earliest stages of human development. So, using CRISPR, they deleted that gene in human embryos that had been donated for research. When they analyzed the edited embryos and compared them to ones that hadn’t been edited, they found something troubling: Around half of the edited embryos contained major unintended edits.
As long as human embryos are destroyed, Goofus is happy. Gallant's ex-wife donated the embryos.
A few weeks ago I stumbled across a Youtube live stream that was clearly faked. It claimed Elon Musk was giving away 5000 BTC (roughly $47 million as of June 16, 2020). I flagged it as a Bitcoin scam and I assume the feed went down once a moderator saw the flag. Then the weird part happened. Youtube’s algorithm, knowing my interest in blockchain technology and my brush with a “giveaway” now recommends subsequent scams as they go live.
Goofus works at Google and is too busy policing Zero Hedge to police YouTube scams. All of Gallant's money is tied up in ammo bought at Cabela's with cash so he's safe.
In the study, the team found that replacing half of the blood plasma of old mice with a mixture of saline and albumin — where the albumin simply replaces protein that was lost when the original blood plasma was removed — has the same or stronger rejuvenation effects on the brain, liver and muscle than pairing with young mice or young blood exchange.
Goofus is thirty-three years old and dresses like a toddler. Old age never enters his mind, except to vote for Bernie so he can collect Social Security before he graduates college. Gallant loses so much blood at his construction job that this treatment would be superfluous.
The European Commission has opened formal antitrust investigations to assess whether Apple's rules for app developers on the distribution of apps via the App Store violate EU competition rules. The investigations concern in particular the mandatory use of Apple's own proprietary in-app purchase system and restrictions on the ability of developers to inform iPhone and iPad users of alternative cheaper purchasing possibilities outside of apps.
Goofus adores Apple and the EU in equal measure, so his head might explode. Gallant has heard of Europe, but isn't quite sure if it's a real place or not, so he doesn't care one way or the other.
Well, it's Tuesday. There's no "fresh week" feeling to Tuesday. You don't unwrap a Tuesday. The package is already broken open, and inexpertly taped back up, like most of the tools at Harbor Freight. In geologic terms, it's really not any closer to Friday than Monday was, so you can't even lie to yourself about being one day closer to the weekend with any gusto. Tuesday just is. Let's get on with it.
During the restoration, [Curtis] found residue and crystals stuck under one of the knobs of the Control Voltage Processing Module. Was it flux, conformal coating, or something else? [Eliot] hit the board with contact cleaner and wiped it down. Within 45 minutes, he was feeling a strange tingling. It was the beginning of a nine-hour LSD trip.
My car mechanic took LSD once. He said he had an auto body experience.
Researchers at the University of Oxford have begun enrolling subjects in a phase 2/3 clinical trial of AstraZeneca-partnered COVID-19 vaccine AZD1222. The next stage of the program, which follows a 1,000-subject phase 1, is set to enroll 10,260 people in the U.K. to generate results to support the first shipments to customers in September.
And just like all flu vaccines, there will be cardboard signs outside of every pharmacy and supermarket offering free flu shots, which no one will get.
Six former employees of eBay, Inc. have been charged with leading a cyberstalking campaign targeting the editor and publisher of a newsletter that eBay executives viewed as critical of the company. The alleged harassment included sending the couple anonymous, threatening messages, disturbing deliveries – including a box of live cockroaches, a funeral wreath and a bloody pig mask – and conducting covert surveillance of the victims.
It sounds like everyone involved works part time at Hardbodies
All this from my point of view. Perhaps you are right and I am all wrong. Your work is an extraordinary experiment and I would go out of my way to save it from destructive or restrictive interruption. It has its believers and its following. Let them rejoice in it. To me it is a dead end.
Once upon a time and a very good time it was H.G. Wells was coming down along the road and this Wells that was down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby Joyce and told him he was a jerk.
The EAT-Lancet report, published in 2019, was the result of the deliberation and collaboration of 37 experts. Unsurprisingly, 31 out of the 37 espoused vegetarian views before joining the project. The leader of this project, Walter Willet, has an extensive list of conflicts of interest, such as his personal vegetarian diet, having spent his entire career publishing epidemiology surrounding the benefits of plant-based diets, and is a member of at least 7 groups/enterprises that promote high grain/plant diets. Additionally, ‘in the last few years of Willett’s directorship of the Harvard T.S. Chan School of Public Health, the school received between $455,000 and $1,500,000 from companies or groups interested in promoting vegetarian products or the vegetarian diet generally.
Want to go vegan? Cut out the middleman and become a Seventh-Day Adventist
Indian government sources said no shots were fired but a physical fight broke out between the two sides with soldiers using batons and throwing stones, which resulted in the casualties.
Both sides have nuclear weapons, but they're bashing each other's heads in with sticks and stones. A parable for our times.
To test just how bad the problem is, Szathmari re-registered old domain names for several law firms that had merged, set up an email server, and without hacking anything, he says he received a steady stream of confidential information, including bank correspondence, invoices from other law firms, sensitive legal documents from clients, and updates from LinkedIn.
Domain names are like herpes. If you don't want to have it forever, don't get it in the first place.
According to a new study in The Astrophysical Journal, there could be dozens of intelligent alien civilizations hiding in our galaxy, all capable of communicating. “There should be at least a few dozen active civilizations in our Galaxy under the assumption that it takes 5 billion years for intelligent life to form on other planets, as on Earth,” Christopher Conselice, Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Nottingham and lead author of the study, said in a statement.
And according to new research I just finished, Blake Lively could be trying to phone me right now.
Skateboarder Tony Hawk charges $1,000 for a Zoom call, and football player Brett Favre charges $5,000. Cameo says up to four additional friends or family can join the call, and people have up to 24 hours before the call to cancel. If the celebrity doesn’t show up, they’ll get a refund. Fifty stars have signed on to the feature for launch.
That's funny. I would pay five bucks to avoid a Zoom call with Tony Hawk or Brett Favre.
We’re all currently busy not sitting in the stands. Everything sport-like is closed down. I heartily approve, but not as a temporary measure. They’re thinking of having the NFL play in empty stadiums so you can watch it on TV and sneeze at home. But your couch is just the stands. We should refuse to go back to the stands, period.
Everyone already refuses to sit in the stands at their kids' Little League games. They're all on the field having fistfights with the umpires and the other parents.
Have a milquetoast, non-denominational, vibe-less, nondescript, average Tuesday everyone. It's the best you can hope for.
The larger French Revolution era extended all the way until the end of the Franco-Prussian War. This current situation, as I'd written about the other day, is much like the French Revolution.
The general approach of this crowd isn't too dissimilar to the Spanish Inquisition, either. If you're not in, you're out, and you're going to have to be punished. They claim their 'goal' is peace and freedom. They prefer to see people suffer. They have marketed themselves to their constituency well, shifting everyone's eyes away from historical precedent.
Hello all. Roger de Hauteville here, sitting in for Bird Dog. He's gone for his yearly sojourn to get a flea bath and his nails clipped. If he plays his cards right, maybe he'll even get a belly rub from Mrs. Bird Dog.
While it's true I'm "sitting in," there will be, thankfully, no sit-ins on my watch. I'm Sicilian, remember? Haven't you seen the Godfather movies? We don't do sit ins. We don't riot. We don't hold placards and march in a circle. We say nothing about our affairs to strangers, and precious little about them even to our friends. If any action is required, we visit you in the night, and whisper your transgressions in your ear. These remonstrations beat demonstrations every time. Act accordingly.
The Paper, citing Yangtse Evening Post, said she was able to receive relevant information beforehand that tells her if the flight was going to be delayed or cancelled. Thereafter, she would purchase the tickets to the flights that are likely to be delayed or cancelled, before checking if there is any extreme weather along the route the flight is going to take that day.
Wow. $589,000. That's almost enough money to take two extra bags on her next flight.
Those numbers underscore the appeal of ACH payments: they are often significantly cheaper than other methods. For example, a $5,000 transaction made with ACH could cost the originator anywhere from $0.25 - $5, whereas the same transaction would cost $90 if it were made with a credit card.
Remember Betteridge's Law of Headlines. If a headline ends in a question mark, the answer is always "No."
Teleconferencing company Zoom acknowledged it shut down the accounts of several activists and online commemorations of the Tiananmen Square massacre at China's request. The revelation followed media reports, citing Hong Kong and U.S.-based activists, who found their accounts suspended.
The current administration uses the wrong casus belli to address the problem with uniformly left wing online platforms. Don't break them up because they're monopolies. Jail Zoom execs because they're unregistered lobbyists. Don't break up Google. Jail them because it's fraud to call yourself a search engine while selling the top spots to advertisers. Twitter is a political action group that forgot to register. Jail time. See? Problem solved.
Our languages are incredibly diverse and it is highly unlikely to find a word or a handful of words that sound the same in all languages. Except that there is a word that is shared by all human languages, according to research. Surprise, surprise..the word is ‘huh’. Weird, huh! Well, it turns out that this is probably a universal word.
One notices that the word "probably" appears in the first paragraph, but not in the headline. Can't go admitting the truth right away, or people won't read it.
Today, stars fill the night sky. But when the universe was in its infancy, it contained no stars at all. And an international team of scientists is closer than ever to detecting, measuring and studying a signal from this era that has been traveling through the cosmos ever since that starless era ended some 13 billion years ago.
She was passionate about providing access and information to everyone, not just computer scientists. She also envisioned a world in which computers made people smarter and learned to think on their own.
Someone searching for “Game of Thrones torrent” was not going to find The Pirate Bay in the top results. Similarly, filters were set up for music-related queries as well.
As a result, pirate sites saw their search traffic decline drastically. This meant a drop in new visitors to these sites. However, people could still find these pirate sites by searching for their name. We use the past tense here because that has changed for many sites as well.
Kids these days. You're pirates! Look up the word in the dictionary. Banks don't have drive-up windows reserved for bank robbers. Have a little gumption. It's no fun stealing movies if they make it too easy, anyway.
Items found include fragments of ceramic vessels, including bowls and amphorae. There are human and animal bones in the pits, as well as coal. No finds of metal objects have been made at this stage.
I saw Thracian Pit Sanctuary open up for REO Speedwagon at the Providence Civic Center once. Great show.
The Crew Dragon astronauts said the ride on the Falcon 9 rocket was smoother than the space shuttle for the first couple of minutes. The space shuttle launched with two solid rocket boosters, which provided more than two-thirds of the shuttle’s total thrust at liftoff.
They didn't like parking overnight on the moon to recharge the batteries, but other than that, it was fine.
The researchers, who carried out their work in the Particles and Catalysis Research Laboratory led by Scientia Professor Rose Amal, show that by making zinc oxide at very high temperatures using a technique called flame spray pyrolysis (FSP), they can create nanoparticles which act as the catalyst for turning carbon dioxide into ‘syngas’ – a mix of hydrogen and carbon monoxide used in the manufacture of industrial products. The researchers say this method is cheaper and more scalable to the requirements of heavy industry than what is available today.
Waste carbon dioxide. Useful material. Farmers scratch their heads and say, "Huh?"
Apparently, Seattle is now epicenter of the revolution which we have all waited breathlessly for. The NYTimes has headlines saying it's "Free Food, Free Speech and Free of Police", which I suppose is a start. We are expecting great things from these people. 'New ideas' we've never seen before. Lovely. Maybe the food is 'free', though nothing is ever free, and we certainly know the speech is only free if you agree with them. But I'm fairly certain the area is free of police. For now.
Remember a few years ago at Malheur, and those supposed 'right-wing extremist' loony birds were roundly misrepresented by the press? Yeah, me either. Didn't happen. The Feds didn't kill anyone there, either.
I'm sure this Seattle experiment will go really well. Just like Christiana did originally (cough, cough).
By the way, can I just also mention how proud I am of my alma mater's devotion to presenting fact-based opinions and respecting free speech? We're leading the way! Future donations on my part will not be part of the plan. I can show my point of view by withholding money.
Ghosts don't exist, except in history. These ghosts live in our minds, because we are aware of history and hope 'it can't happen here', or that lessons are learned. But some choose to not be aware of history, and make every effort to bring ghosts to life.
For several months, since listening to the French Revolution portion of the Revolutions podcast I mentioned here at Maggie's, I've told friends we're moving toward a new French Revolution. As Minneapolis moves to defund its police department, one can only wonder, will it be replaced with a Committee of Public Safety? In a perverse way, I hope they do create one.
The ghosts of Marat, Robespierre, Danton and countless others are alive again. I'm sure our modern day radicals will say "This time is different" or "It wasn't done right the last time" or some other excuse will be provided. I have to admit, though, it's fun to see these people turn on their own kind. It's also frightening. A friend of mine was sending me pictures today from Manhattan of the destroyed store fronts. It's pretty extensive, and the minimal news coverage of how bad it was provides a kind of rationale for the radical influence to keep pushing. There is no shame in destruction if it's not visible. But the destruction, too, is a ghost - not visible to many.
Jonathan Turley puts his own spin on it here. Being a modern-day Abbe Sieyes isn't something I thought I'd begin to aspire to, but it may be a worthwhile goal nonetheless.
When it comes to the COVID-19 event, we have been experiencing a serious case of tunnel vision. As we focus on the day to day increase of COVID-19 things could look pretty grim, but as we take a step back and look at the comparative total mortality here in the US, things aren’t much worse than a bad seasonal flu, like that last seen in 2017-18. If you take the New York City region out of the mix, the rest of the country is cumulatively well within the expected mortality.
Written by a young white lady, of course. She probably never tried to run even a candy shop.
If I had my own shop, I would confront looters with firearms. My "shop", so to speak, is in an office suite up in a building in Manhattan, and the corona mess has damaged our business enough already.
Being constructive is so hard, but being destructive is a no-brainer.
If you’re shopping at Walmart because you believe it’s one of the last big chains with mainstream American values, you might want to rethink that idea.
The current coronavirus pandemic appears more comparable in terms of overall mortality to the influenza epidemics of 1957 and 1968, or the British flu epidemics of the late 1990s. Of course, the United States and United Kingdom did not only not shut down for any of those epidemics, they received little attention outside the health care system.
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.
Decluttering: 
Image: My answer to the question is "No"