June 2, 2025

FIVE YEARS AGO TODAY, THE PIVOT BEGAN: ‘Did I miss the memo?’: Hospital workers in full PPE applaud George Floyd protesters as they march past.

As Greenwald writes in his follow-up tweet, “That episode single-handedly destroyed trust in public health officials, proving they’d politicize their expertise when convenient. Corporate media celebrated a douchebag-lawyer shaming families at deserted beaches, then — overnight! — cheered densely packed street protests.”

QED: Shot: Grief and COVID-19: Mourning our bygone lives.

The COVID-19 pandemic is an epidemiological crisis, but also a psychological one. While the situation provokes anxiety, stress and sadness, it is also a time of collective sorrow, says Sherry Cormier, PhD, a psychologist who specializes in grief and grief mentoring. “It’s important that we start recognizing that we’re in the middle of this collective grief. We are all losing something now.”

Many people are reckoning with individual losses, including illness and death due to the novel coronavirus, or loss of employment as a result of economic upheaval. But even people who haven’t lost anything so concrete as a job or a loved one are affected, Cormier says. “There is a communal grief as we watch our work, health-care, education and economic systems — all of these systems we depend on — destabilize,” she says.

—The American Psychological Association, April 1st, 2020.

Chaser: APA’s action plan for addressing inequality.

Dear Colleagues,

We are writing to you while still reeling from the tragic murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police and the ongoing protests, which are reverberating in a shockwave throughout our nation and around the world.

These recent events present us with an urgent challenge—as an association, discipline and profession, and individual psychologists—to bring our expertise to bear to address the range of underlying problems these events represent from discrimination to racism, which have resulted in long-standing social, economic, and political inequalities, from police brutality, to the disproportionate spread of the coronavirus among black and brown people, to the soaring unemployment rates among communities of color.

APA is urging psychologists to share their thoughts and recommendations for using the power of psychology to address the “pandemic of racism,” both in the short and long term. As part of that process, we must also examine our role as a field and as an association in perpetuating these ills.

—The American Psychological Association, June 2nd, 2020.

Note the photos atop those Webpages. The April 1st post is illustrated by photos of an elderly white woman looking frustrated in her apartment, and a young black woman staring wistfully into the distance outside the window of her apartment, with the photos separated by a white dividing line to emphasize both persons’ isolation from the world. Contrast that with the photo of the massed protestors carrying “Black Lives Matter” placards atop the June 2nd post.

NPR also pivoted on June 2nd, 2020:

The DNC-MSM and local mayors turned on a dime from enforcing hard-line lockdown rules and shaming anyone who went to church or got a haircut, to letting rioters congregate with impunity. Bill de Blasio was quoted five years ago today, “When you see…an entire nation, simultaneously grappling with an extraordinary crisis seated in 400 years of American racism, I’m sorry, that is not the same question as the understandably aggrieved store owner or the devout religious person who wants to go back to services.”

Flashbacks:

● After telling GOP to downsize convention due to COVID-19, N.C. governor marches in crowded protest.

● NJ governor admits COVID-19 double standard, says recent protests are different from business owners’ complaints.

● De Blasio: Large Group Protests Are Acceptable, Religious Observances Are Not.

● NPR: Dozens of public health and disease experts have signed an open letter in support of the nationwide anti-racism protests. “White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19,” they wrote.

● The Suicide of Expertise.

● Welcome to protest season, where the cause changes but the tactics stay the same.

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll 7

ROTUND BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU: Smartphone smuggled out of North Korea reveals the insane things Kim Jong Un does to control his ‘suffocated’ people.

A smartphone smuggled out of North Korea has revealed the astonishing levels of control the secretive dictatorship is exercising over its people.

The phone, which from the outside appears no different from a normal device, issued warnings about using South Korean slang words to users, and auto-corrected “South Korea” to read “puppet state,” an investigation from the BBC found.

It would also covertly take a screenshot every five minutes, storing the images in a secret folder which the user couldn’t access, but which presumably were accessible to North Korean authorities.

To be fair, I’m not sure how much worse that last item is in practice than the backdoor the FBI wanted built into every smartphone, or similar requirements in effect now in the UK.

Posted at 7:32 am by Stephen Green 5

YES.

Posted at 7:30 am by Glenn Reynolds 4

GARBAGE CAUSE, GARBAGE SUPPORTERS, BOOSTED BY GARBAGE MEDIA:

Posted at 7:25 am by Glenn Reynolds 13

ICYMI: CHANGE: “Learn to Code” Backfires Spectacularly as Comp-Sci Majors Suddenly Have Sky-High Unemployment.

It looks like the “learn to code” push is backfiring spectacularly for those who bought in.

As Newsweek reports, recent college graduates who majored in computer science are facing high unemployment rates alongside the increasing probability of being laid off or replaced by artificial intelligence if and when they do get hired.

In its latest labor market report, the New York Federal Reserve found that recent CS grads are dealing with a whopping 6.1 precent unemployment rate. Those who majored in computer engineering — which is similar, if not more specialized — are faring even worse, with 7.5 percent of recent graduates remaining jobless. Comparatively, the New York Fed found, per 2023 Census data and employment statistics, that recent grads overall have only a 5.8 percent unemployment rate.

While folks who majored in fields like anthropology and physics fared even worse, with unemployment rates of 9.4 and 7.8 percent respectively, computer engineering had the third-highest rate of unemployment on the New York Fed’s rankings, while computer science had the seventh — a precipitous fall from grace for a major once considered an iron-clad ticket to high earnings and  job security.

(Those numbers, notably, are worse even than the outcomes for journalism grads. Despite being accurately advised that their chosen field is dying, recent grads who majored in journalism are only experiencing unemployment at a rate of 4.4 percent, per the NYFR’s analysis.)

The first line of the above Newsweek article links to a 2019 New Republic article with the headline, “The Fetid, Right-Wing Origins of ‘Learn to Code.’ How an online swarm has developed a sophisticated mechanism to harass and gaslight journalists—and to get mainstream media outlets to join in.”

Yes, that “fetid right-wing origin” of paying attention to and quoting the things that leftist politicians and journalists were telling Americans. Or as Matt Vespa wrote in January of last year at Townhall: They Created This Term to Smear Average Americans. Now It’s Come Back to Haunt Them.

Liberal media outlets are starting to get pinched. While it’s sad when anyone gets fired, these folks were at the forefront of shaming those whose employment they determined was less-than, archaic, or not in keeping with the ways of the new world, whatever that means. In other words, if it required manual labor, the media, Democrats, and the coastal elite viewed it as a state of serfdom. Coal miners were a popular target. Whole communities that dot Appalachia were subjected to what some would call a regional genocide under the Obama presidency. His agenda took a hatchet to coal jobs, and most of these towns seldom recovered.

That’s when the “learn to code” smear was tossed into the mix by liberal reporters to coal miners and other workers who lost their livelihoods. The labor was viewed as inferior if it didn’t require a college education. Even worse, reporters mocked these newly unemployed workers, blaming them for being uneducated. The job retraining programs were a publicity stunt. Even labor unions knew this was a ruse. So, it was delicious revenge to see LA Times employees essentially saying that “learn to code” is heartless and unoriginal amid the layoffs. No, you don’t get to play that game. You created it. Now, sit there like good children, be wrong, and shut up. You lost your job—you don’t have a right to say anything.

And right around that time: Ex CNNer Chris Cillizza Community Noted AND Ratioed After Denying Biden Ever Said This.

Flashback: Then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Defends Twitter’s #LearntoCode Purges. As Steve noted in 2019, “Dorsey claims that #LearnToCode is coded language for some kind of threat, when in fact it originated with asshole members of the press who somehow didn’t get purged when they used it against ordinary Americans who had lost their jobs to Obama’s anti-coal regulations.”

QED:

And Frank J. Fleming’s irony is going right over the heads of the many Twitter users who would love to use journalistic tools to destroy someone for having different political beliefs:

In January of 2023, Glenn warned: The Coming ‘Symbolic Analyst’ Meltdown.

And thus:

(Original post by Ed.)

Posted at 7:00 am by Glenn Reynolds 32

June 1, 2025

NEW YORK REP. JERRY NADLER SAYS DHS AGENT HANDCUFFED HIS STAFF MEMBER AT CONGRESSIONAL OFFICE:

New York Rep. Jerry Nadler says a member of his staff was handcuffed by a Department of Homeland Security agent at his congressional office Wednesday.

The incident was caught on video.

According to a DHS spokesperson, Federal Protective Service officers were responding to reports that protesters were inside Nadler’s district office in Manhattan.

“Upon arrival, officers were granted entry and encountered four individuals. Officers identified themselves and explained their intent to conduct a security check, however, one individual became verbally confrontational and physically blocked access to the office. The officers then detained the individual in the hallway for the purpose of completing the security check. All were released without further incident,” DHS said in a statement.

In a statement released Saturday, Nadler said the DHS agents “forcefully” entered his office and handcuffed a member of his staff.

“The decision to enter a Congressional office and detain a staff member demonstrates a deeply troubling disregard for proper legal boundaries. If this can happen in a Member of Congress’s office, it can happen to anyone–and it is happening,” Nadler said, in part.

Related: “Nobody is above the law.”

—Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), May 15th, 2019.

Posted at 10:03 pm by Ed Driscoll 143

OPEN THREAD: Ring out the weekend.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds 1512

HAMASHOLES: Breaking: ‘Targeted Terror Attack’ in Boulder. “A self-proclaimed Palestinian activist showed up with a garden sprayer full of something flammable – witnesses said it was clear but smelled like gasoline – sprayed the group, and then threw Molotov cocktails as he shouted obscenities and watched elderly human beings in flames. . . . The descriptions of the injuries are so ghastly.”

I’m devastated to think of the wave of Islamophobia that this incident may set off.

UPDATE:

Every decent American should be carrying. This guy shouldn’t have lived long enough to be arrested. He should have been plugged as soon as he started.

UPDATE (From Ed):

MORE (FROM GLENN):

STILL MORE: What ‘Globalize the Intifada’ Looks Like: Eyewitness Provides Harrowing Account of Boulder Terror Attack.

If the intifada is globalized, doesn’t that make Hamasholes legitimate military targets everywhere?

Posted at 9:14 pm by Glenn Reynolds 646