JUST FINISHED DAVID BLACK’S HARRY GILMOUR SERIES, which starts with Gone to Sea in a Bucket. Gilmour’s a Royal Navy submariner in WWII, and these books are comparable with Run Silent, Run Deep, which is high praise.
Archive for 2020
May 31, 2020
REMEMBER WHEN THE PRESS WAS TELLING US IT WAS ALL ABOUT THE VENTILATORS? “New York’s largest hospital system is conducting a sweeping analysis of its use of ventilators while treating coronavirus patients during the peak of the pandemic. The study comes as experts have raised concerns that an over-reliance on the machines may have actually cost lives. For so many sick COVID-19 patients, getting attached to a mechanical ventilator was a death sentence. More than two-thirds of the patients in Northwell Health facilities hooked to ventilators died in March and early April and the fatality rate was similar at other hospitals.”
SEEN ON FACEBOOK:
I think Barr will provide his proof, with evidence of collaboration between Antifa and elements of the media and various political actors. And then the proof will be treated as an outrage because reasons.
THE CALLS ARE COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE: Mayor Bill de Blasio’s daughter, Chiara, arrested at Manhattan protest.
And, like father, like son:
(Classical reference in headline.)
OPEN THREAD: Be very very quiet, clock everything you see. Little things might matter later, at the start of the end of history.
OCEANIA HAS NEVER BEEN AT WAR WITH EAST ASIA. Trump, White Supremacists And Russia: Here’s Who Democrats Have Blamed For Riots So Far.
CULTURAL APPROPRIATION:
Travon Walton, a 25-year-old student from Long Beach, arrived in the Fairfax area in the afternoon to join the protests.
He said he saw many non-black protesters inciting the police from up close and worried that the black community would be blamed. “All the white people are in the front,” he said. “We’re going to be the ones that get the backlash.”
People egging these riots on — or just plain inciting them — aren’t doing it because they have the black community’s best interests at heart. (Original paywalled L.A. Times version here.)
AS STEVE STIRLING WAS SAYING ON FACEBOOK, future historians are likely to view this as the key element of our time, not pandemics, riots, or politics. With SpaceX’s first astronaut launch, a new era of human spaceflight has dawned.
RESPONDING TO MOBS: Critics of the NYPD want cops to stand down in the face of violence.
Perversely, the sympathies of New York’s political leadership and media went to the mob. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted, “NYPD officers just drove an SUV into a crowd of human beings. They could’ve killed them, & we don’t know how many they injured. NO ONE gets to slam an SUV through a crowd of human beings. @NYCMayor these officers need to be brought to justice, not dismissed w/‘internal reviews.’” City Council Speaker Corey Johnson denounced the van’s driver. “This is outrageous. Driving police vehicles into crowds of protestors is not deescalation.” Publicly funded protest organization Make the Road fumed, “Simply unbearable and enraging. NYPD continues to unleash deadly violence against members of our community.”
Protest does not include the right to block plainly marked emergency vehicles. None of the elected officials or community groups so enraged by the van driver offer an alternative for how a cop should respond when set upon by a violent mob. Civil disobedience is supposed to mean that, in the face of the state’s overwhelming monopoly on force, the protester responds with passive, nonviolent resistance. But today’s radical Left leaders, like AOC, have inverted that logic: in the face of mob violence, police should go limp, de-escalate the conflict, and hope that they don’t get burned to death.
Related: “There is a validated playbook for dealing with riots:”
It is a tale of two riots in the awful summer of widespread racial unrest in 1967. Eugene Methvin’s 1991 National Review “riot primer” laid out the playbook:
In a nutshell: Riots begin when some set of social forces temporarily overwhelms or paralyzes the police, who stand by, their highly visible inaction signaling to the small percentage of teenaged embryonic psychopaths and hardened young adults that a moral holiday is under way. This criminal minority spearheads the car-burning, window-smashing, and blood-letting, mobbing such hate targets as blacks, or white merchants, or lone cops. Then the drawing effect brings out the large crowds of older men, and women and children, to share the Roman carnival of looting. Then the major killing begins: slow runners caught in burning buildings and-as civic forces mobilize-in police and National Guard gunfire.…
The time to halt a riot is right at the start, by pinching off the criminal spearhead with precise and overwhelming force. The cops will usually be caught flat-footed (no pun intended) by the initial outbreak. But they need to spring into a pre-arranged mobilization that should always be as ready in every major city as the fire-department or hospital disaster-response program.
Methvin compared two July 1967 riots. In Toledo, rioters began smashing things, throwing rocks at police cruisers. The authorities resounded instantly and decisively, arresting the thugs, with order restored within 36 hours. No one died. Not so in Detroit, where the authorities decided to allow rioters to let off steam. Five days of violence followed, with more than 40 fatalities and more than 1,000 injured. Property damage was estimated at over $40 million, in 2020 dollars, roughly $300 million. It was the worst rioting in America since the 1863 New York City draft riots, not to be exceeded in scale until the 1992 Rodney King riots.
And there is a lasting loss for failing to do so.
Read the whole thing.
More: “Barr about to unmask all of Antifa’s communications with their media and political allies. Now you know why so many people are freaking out today.”
MEMPHIS SUBURBS BRACING FOR POSSIBLE VIOLENCE FROM ANTIFA:
At least four Germantown police cruisers were also seen patrolling the streets around the upscale shopping district and another police car was stationed in the parking lot.
ANTIFA America posted a profane threat on its Twitter feed – warning that they were going to cause mayhem in suburban areas around the nation – especially residential areas.
Here’s a Google cache of the tweet; Twitter has since suspended the account:
UPDATE (6/1/20): False flag operation? NBC is reporting: White nationalist group posing as antifa called for violence on twitter.
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS: Protesters Take to NYC Streets for 4th Day; Mayor Says No Curfew Planned for Sunday Night.
Flashback: De Blasio Under Fire For Singling Out Jewish Community In Tweet:
Related: NYC health head rejected NYPD mask plea: ‘I don’t give two rats’ asses about your cops.’
NEWS YOU CAN USE: How to Give a Great Foot Massage. One of Robert Heinlein’s pieces of marital advice was “rub her feet.” It’s good advice.
AT AMAZON, save in Business and Industrial Supplies.
FLASHBACK: You Are Probably Breaking The Law Right Now.
RADICAL CHIC: THE NEXT GENERATION. Pair of Brooklyn lawyers including Ivy League corporate attorney charged in Molotov cocktail attack on NYPD cruiser.
QUALIFIED IMMUNITY: Police act like laws don’t apply to them because of ‘qualified immunity.’ They’re right.
If qualified immunity exists at all — and it shouldn’t — it should be by statute. Instead it’s a doctrine that judges literally made up out of thin air because they thought it was a good idea.
META TITLE ON A SLATE ARTICLE YESTERDAY: Destroying a police precinct is a reasonable response to unreasonable killings.
(The meta title is what Google picks up for its search engine. You can find loads of articles on how to optimize them for the highest results in a Google search — by doing a Google search.)
The above article’s author, “Steven W. Thrasher is the inaugural Daniel H. Renberg Chair of social justice in reporting (with an emphasis on issues relevant to the LGBTQ community) and an assistant professor of journalism,” at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism in Evanston, Illinois. Annual cost of tuition there is $65,916, not including room and board.
Slate is owned by the Graham Holdings Company, which previously owned the Washington Post, until selling it to Jeff Bezos in 2013.
Related: From Roger Kimball at the Epoch Times: Those Burning Our Cities Aim at Destroying Our Civilization.
And creating massive no-go zones for the police in some of America’s most dangerous neighborhoods. Flashback: As Chicago backs off policing, its murder rate skyrockets ever higher.
In 1991’s Parliament of Whores, P.J. O’Rourke famously wrote:
Not long after Andy [Ferguson] and I met, we were driving down Pennsylvania Avenue and encountered some or another noisy pinko demonstration. “How come,” I asked Andy, “whenever something upsets the Left, you see immediate marches and parades and rallies with signs already printed and rhyming slogans already composed, whereas whenever something upsets the Right, you see two members of the Young Americans for Freedom waving a six-inch American flag?”
“We have jobs,” said Andy.
As Kurt Schlichter wrote in his Twitter thread on Trump saying that he will declare Antifa a terrorist orginization, “When the first of these little trust fund sissies figures out he’s not walking out of his cell after 20 minutes with a $50 fine but looking at five years in Leavenworth on a Fed rap, he’ll squeal on his comrades. This is an opportunity to destroy Antifa root and branch, and to eliminate the armed wing of the Democrat party. Forever.”
NEW SOCIALIST “IT GIRL” CONTINUES TO PAY DIVIDENDS: AOC Shares ‘Protesting Safely’ Guidelines, Warns of ‘White Supremacist’ Infiltration.
And from another member of the “Squad:” Rep Omar: Some Protestors ‘Felt Terrorized By The Presence Of The National Guard And The Militarized Police.’
PAUL RAHE: Before Standardized Testing.
What, you might ask, did universities do before the SAT and ACT existed? Some had their own exams – which gave great advantage to those who could travel to the campus to take it. Others emphasized “character” – which, though in principle admirable, tended in practice to mean that to be successful an applicant had to belong to the appropriate social class. In much of the Ivy League, this meant that Catholics, Jews, and the like had no need to bother applying. As discovery in a recent court case against Harvard revealed, this is how that university excludes Asian-American applicants today.
There’s more to it than that, though.