Just to clarify

Kneeling on the neck of an habitual criminal for seven or eight minutes until he dies is murder.

Shooting a fleeing habitual criminal to death as he flees when much less force would have worked is murder, even if some cop manual permits or even recommends it.

But I am not on board for the absurd mythology of overwhelming and overwhelmingly powerful racism, systemic or otherwise, exploited and spread every election season by the depraved propaganda of Democrats without concern for its destructive consequences.

And I am even further from on board with condoning or tolerating riots for three f-ing months.

Update 8/30.

George Floyd wasn't killed by Dereck Chauvin. He od'd on recreational drugs. The kneeling had nothing to do with it and was apparently by the book.

Jacob Blake's shooting might have been by the book. Seems he was a fleeing felon resisting arrest and had or was reaching for a weapon.

Dear Joe. Stay home. The front porch strategy is working fine.

Trump is desperate for debates, the more and the sooner the better.

And that is why Biden should shrug them off.

The bare suggestion has provoked a firestorm of ridicule and rage in the GOP media, but so what?

Trump and Biden engage in debate gamesmanship

Really, with Trump it would be just an installment of the Joe Pyne Show, or the McLaughlin Group.

A shout fest of insults, ridicule, and belittlement.

Why should America care who is better at that?

Hint: it's the Duce.

And that's a bad thing, not a good thing.

Apples and oranges both having their way.

Leftist rioters still raising hell after 47 days and violent criminals seizing an opportunity offered by police irresponsibility actually sometimes excused by right wing opinionators at Fox are nevertheless two very different things, willfully conflated in some right wing news coverage.

As city violence surges, liberal mayors engage in social media feuds with Trump officials

As violence and unrest surge in major cities across the U.S., liberal mayors are taking a combative stance toward the Trump administration and offers of federal help -- engaging in sometimes-feisty social media feuds with officials.

And the vitriol is flowing in both directions.

“Hey Karen. Watch your mouth,” Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot tweeted Thursday in response to White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany, who described her as the “derelict mayor” of the city because of the surge in violence there.

At a guess, McEnany was thinking "dereliction of duty" while Lightfoot was thinking "dumpster diving wino".

But maybe not.

That tweet came the same evening as three people, including a 5-month-old baby boy, were shot in Chicago. 

CBS Chicago reported that the Windy City has seen a 34 percent increase in murders and a 45 percent increase in shootings through the end of June compared with the same time last year.

But on Friday, Lightfoot was doubling down on her clapback after receiving praise for it online.

"This won't be the last time that his flacks try to take me on. But good luck," Lightfoot said. 

"I'm still here. I'm going to lead this city the best I can.”

Meanwhile, in New York City, violence has skyrocketed. 

The New York Post this week reported that on Monday alone, 17 people were shot in the city, while last month was the most violent June in the city since 1996.

Trump v de Blasio

But Mayor Bill de Blasio had made as one of his priorities the painting of a large yellow “Black Lives Matter” mural down Fifth Avenue -- right outside Trump Tower, in a clear knock at the current occupant of the White House.

Trump, another politician who is fond of a social media battle with his political foes, criticized de Blasio for the move and noted the mayor's efforts to cut police budgets as it tries to get to grips with a new crime wave.

“NYC is cutting Police $’s by ONE BILLION DOLLARS, and yet the @NYCMayor is going to paint a big, expensive, yellow Black Lives Matter sign on Fifth Avenue, denigrating this luxury Avenue,” Trump tweeted this month.

“Here’s what you don’t understand: Black people BUILT 5th Ave and so much of this nation,” de Blasio shot back. 

“Your ‘luxury’ came from THEIR labor, for which they have never been justly compensated. We are honoring them. The fact that you see it as denigrating your street is the definition of racism.”

We are all familiar with and tired of the lies of the Great Fat Orange Klansman, but I at any rate am tiring of the ludicrous liberal lie, apparently to be endlessly repeated, that the black people of America "built this country".

While everyone else lazed around sipping Mint Juleps, no doubt.

And I confess I oppose the demand for reparations.

I deny most of the claims offered to defend that demand and accept those offered against it, as well as many other things that could be offered against it but generally aren't.

This poll is nearly a year old. Couldn't find one more recent.

Nearly 75% of African Americans support reparations for slavery. Only 15% of white Americans do, a poll says

I would guess more blacks and more whites favor the idea, today.

And again I am guessing that it's an idea whose time will eventually come.

A helpful reminder why some whites voted for the Great Fat Orange Klansman

Zerlina Maxwell And 'The End Of White Politics'

She spends a lot of time on MSNBC insisting on the unique importance of the black vote, pushing for a fairly radical racial leftist agenda and defending vandalism of any white monument, so far as I can tell.

Might not be entirely right, so, cum grano salis.

Still, she (probably) and many others (certainly) on that network and at CNN and BBC News, many of them white, validate the warnings of what now seems an age ago, when Trump and others first claimed it's not really just about public honors for the Confederacy.

It's about a veto on any public honors exercised by agents of the racial left for whom not many whites would be allowed monuments in the United States of America, or perhaps in any white settler-state in the world.

If even Lincoln doesn't pass your test . . . .

Her anticipation of the eventual demographic eclipse of whites and her insistence that the Democrats behave as though it's already happened and magically made blacks the US majority, or at least the majority of the Democratic Party (it absolutely won't do the former and probably won't do the latter), will seem excessive to many and scary to some.

[The online CIA Factbook says the US is still over 70 % white and about 13 % black and above 15% all others. Hispanic is not a race but an ethnicity, and Hispanics may be of any race and are so counted in the US census.]

[Political sites or organizations of any persuasion seem all to insist it's really about non-Hispanic whites rather than whites in general. Because why? Justices Sotomayor and the late Cardozo not white enough? Does Juan Carlos de Borbón seem a little too dark?]

She wants the Democrats to behave like a nonwhite - a racial left party is what she really means - party, at least as regards its agenda, and to more or less ignore the (non-racial left) whites who presumably make up an actual majority of its voters, members, and officials by a pretty long way.

She says this is what they need to do to win elections; trying to bring back white Obama voters who went with Trump last time - who make no sense at all to me - won't work.

Of course she says that.

Given the outsize roll she wants for the racial left and their ludicrous, anti-white agenda, what else would she say?

MSNBC and CNN and Donald Trump are all just fine with that.

Miller, Bannon, and even David Duke will send her fan mail and flowers.

Dishonesty is sometimes the best policy

The Supremes today cancelled the freedom of the electors to save the republic from the idiocy of the voters by cancelling their authority to actually choose the president.

On the other hand, affirming their authority to make their own choice would invite far more widespread faithlessness motivated and inspired by shocking new levels of skulduggery and corruption.

Most of the time, the rules of the states lead to results that mirror the popular vote nationally.

Admitting the freedom of the electors could lead to results that far more often defy the national popular vote.

So this utterly dishonest decision is more than welcome.

Supreme Court rules 'faithless electors' can't go rogue at Electoral College

They affirm that state constraints on the votes of electors are constitutionally OK and can be enforced, though where they don't exist the electors are free to vote as they choose.

Nor does it seem they pronounced the faithless votes of faithless electors invalid.

They regard the electors as mere agents who must do as they are told. If they are told.

The 538 people who cast the actual votes for president in December as part of the Electoral College are not free agents and must vote as the laws of their states direct, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday.

"Because it would be stupid" is not a reason to disbelieve that the constitution says or does something.

Nor is it a good reason to disbelieve the constitution does not say or do something.

But it's a good, if contestable, reason to say that the constitution says or does something, or that it does not.

Do American blacks hate whites and white America the way Arabs hate Jews and Israel?

No doubt.

More than seventy years of liberal shouting about white racism and black rage and about how they, too, would riot and destroy and hate white people have had a marked impact, encouraging black rage and black belief in white racism.

As was intended, all that time.

White people are aware.

And the hate propaganda becomes earsplitting during election years, especially presidential years.

Why do you suppose so many whites think black hatred of them, "reverse racism", is the biggest problem in American today, bigger than white hatred of blacks?

All those decades of left wing hate propaganda had an impact on whites, too.

And yet they (we) put Obama in the White House, twice, though we knew he had very sore toes about race.

Twice.

And to this day those whites think he may have been the finest president in a long time.

The most presidential in a very, very long time.

A history that should have got better after Communism, but didn't

Largely because Bush pere and the rabidly anti-Communist American classe politique who gave us containment, Korea, Vietnam, and the Taliban were all way too gleeful to publicly dig and dance on the grave of the old Russian Empire, most of what the Soviets still had of it split off with the fall of Communism.

That created the vast well of Russian resentment that powers Putin's strongman regime and the wide appeal, among Russians, of dinging America in world politics.

Do 'bounties' on US troops in Afghanistan reflect a line crossed or 'nothing new' in long US-Russia history?

Is Joe Scarborough to the (racial) left of Joe Biden on the question of public honors?

It seems now to be the standard thing among black talkers on CNN and MSNBC to insist on Jefferson, Washington, Columbus, and even Lincoln getting tossed into the same boat as Confederate leaders.

Including on Morning Joe and, as it seemed to me, uncontradicted by anyone.

Why are mobs of demonstrators still running around and tearing things down this long after the Floyd killing, and this deep into the worsening pandemic?

Because the Democratic media, on the whole to the left of the Democratic Party, keep cheering for them?

Meanwhile, is Fox fully or only partly on board, today, for masking?

On something called Outnumbered the female host and a female guest both firmly endorsed masks, one quoting the Goldman Sacks study as proof we need a federal mask mandate.

Yup. Fox.

America is toast

The message today of the virus experts.

Looks like we're going to find out pretty soon what happens when everybody in an entire country gets infected with this virus, or as near as may be.

If you don't agree the virus is the greatest threat to America and the world today you are a fool.

Not Russia, not racism, not Communism, not immigration, not free trade, and not Secular Humanism.

The virus.

Our goose is cooked because half the country is so stupid it deliberately put a totally useless and malignant clown in the White House.

Deliberately.

He was their kind of guy.

Afghanistan

The bullshit just goes on and on.

The rise of Muslim fundamentalism got the greatest boost in its history when that knee-jerk anti-communist boob, Republican and conservative hero Ronald Reagan, gave the Taliban to the world in order to mess things up for the Russians in Afghanistan.

Russians in Afghanistan would be bad?

Oh, please.

Nowhere near as bad for us, for Afghanistan, or for the entire Muslim world as us handing that country to the Taliban.

That gave us, well, the Taliban, a much-strengthened Al-Qaeda, the attacks of 9/11, an endless war in Afghanistan, a huge rise in terrorism and jihad all over the region, ISIS, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, and the ongoing wastage of trillions of dollars.

Yes, Reagan gave us that, with Bush fils not far behind him.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Meanwhile, Democrats to a man (or woman) are shocked, shocked, that Russians would subsidize military operations against US forces by enemies whom we once subsidized to carry out military operations . . . against the Russians!

A lot of Russia owns Trump claptrap, for day and days.

There is fear and there is judgement

An uninterrupted stream of morons reject the path counselled by good judgement saying "I can't live in fear."

But it's not about being afraid, you f-ing idiots!

Do you live in fear of being hit by a car?

Is that why you don't walk blindfolded onto the turnpike on a childish dare?

Going to Mars is stupid

Just saying.

Pious baloney about the president's health

Nancy Pelosi, Andrea Mitchell, and a host of others are lying that they hope the president is not harmed by the off-label use of that malaria crap.

Phooey.

If it kills him and is recognized to have killed him two goods will be done.

First, Trump is removed.

Second, a valuable lesson is given the country on the worthlessness of "anecdotal" evidence in figuring out what helps and what doesn't.

A valuable discouragement to interference in real medical research by quacks and enthused fans of stupidity.

And the exact opposite result and message will be sent if he continues taking this crap unharmed and uninfected.

Actually, if he just got infected and not killed, that would be a good thing, too.

But nowhere near as good.

The bullshit never stops

Coronavirus propaganda from all directions endlessly shouting "War! It's a war!" and endlessly flattering in worshipful, teary, patriotic tones what a great, brave, swell, noble, loving, capable country and people we are, gee, wow.

Can they give it a rest for a day? And hour?

Americans hated the national speed limit of 55 mph

We rejoiced when it rose back to 65 in most places and higher - on occasion, much higher - in some.

And we knew all along that a higher speed limit meant more people would die in traffic accidents, and that each of us faced a greater risk of being killed when we are part of the traffic.

And the only thing to be said in favor of the higher limits was and is that we were annoyed and made impatient by the lower limit.

Bear all that in mind when someone says the Republican willingness to accept more deaths - even one more death - as the price of getting out of lockdown is genocidal, a decision to murder Americans, and blah, blah, blah.

Of two minds

Anybody who has been reading me for the last few days, weeks, or months knows I am and have been all along of two minds, or more, about the lockdown strategy.

I oppose it ending sooner than necessary.

So when is that?

But I oppose it going on longer than the economy and the democratic capitalism it sustains can safely endure it.

That would be something making its end necessary.

And when is that?

Let her rip, Part Deux

We hear more and more that epidemiologists and public health officials now predict at least 60 % of us will eventually be infected despite any regime of lockdown, testing, contact tracing, or other measures of prevention or delay.

From the outset there has been a “let her rip” current of opinion according to which the virus would eventually have its way with us, topping off with an infection rate at maybe 60 % to 90 % of the entire population.

That current of opinion is still out there and very influential, I think, on the thinking of Republicans and others skeptical of the prevailing lockdown strategy, first adopted in China and then in Europe at a time when it was feared the lethality of this bug could be a lot worse than is now believed, perhaps even as high as that of Ebola, a disease that killed horribly about half of those ever infected.

But we now know much that was not known then.

And our choice now is not whether to lock down but how quickly and how carefully to open up, again.

So let’s review the bidding.

First, we should recall that the overwhelming consensus of the medical and public health authorities favors lockdowns, social distancing, much more extensive testing, and so on.

Professional opinion, in short, though not without some exceptions, continues to favor massive interruption of the normal course of social and economic life.

But on the other side of the issue there are these things.

We were told by pretty much everybody at the start of this pandemic that the point of lockdown was not so much to limit the scope of the disease as to slow infections so the medical system would not be overwhelmed and we would have more time to develop antivirals and vaccines.

And the point of that was to perhaps diminish the total infected and more surely to diminish the total killed, both depending on whether and how badly the hospital system was overwhelmed and how soon effective antivirals and vaccines became available, and also to diminish and spread out the hit the economy would have to take from having lots of people out sick.

But, according to this current of opinion, the economic damage from lockdown has been and remains so bad that it exceeds the damage it prevents, damage done by the unimpeded, natural spread of the virus through a population with no antivirals, no vaccine, and no natural immunity.

It is a losing strategy at every moment it is practiced, on those terms.

But also the number killed from suicides, crimes of cabin fever, and other deadly consequences of lockdown nearly equals or even exceeds the number of those spared.

So the best course of action is to just let her rip, refuse or lift as soon as possible any lockdown and allow the virus to sweep thorough the population as quickly as possible in order to reach stability with general, natural population immunity sooner.

This argument has assumed all along both some degree of natural immunity among those who have recovered and a lethality less than that of the flu.

As to the first, though there has so far been no actual proof it remains the consensus view that people, once recovered, will not generally be vulnerable to another attack from the same virus in the same season.

And lately we have seen reports confirming that the bug is less deadly than flu, reports that the extent of infection in the general population is much higher than was believed and so that the lethality of the bug is much lower.

So the argument to rollback efforts to slow the progress of the disease becomes more persuasive as our experience and knowledge of the disease progress.

And it’s worth noting that the argument to let her rip is even stronger if in fact there will be no vaccines and no antivirals coming to the rescue, if there is nothing of that sort to wait for.

If that is true, the ultimate damage from the virus will be little different with or without delay caused by lockdown while the economic and health damage done by any lockdown will be uselessly and catastrophically added to no good purpose.

This, by the way, provides an explanation why supporters of quick rollback show so little interest in testing of any kind or in measuring so-called “spikes”.

And also why they are not fans of general use of masks, social distancing, or self-isolation, and why they urge re-opening schools and colleges and resuming even stadium sports with no particular concern for such prophylactic measures.

None of that matters, you see.

Lockdown or rollback, with or without masks, social distancing, or self-isolation, no matter what, we are headed toward an inevitable 60 % to 90 % rate of infection and there will also inevitably be many, many more deaths from the bug.

No ensuing test results and no spike, on this view, can show that starting rollback was a bad idea or too carelessly done, or that continuing rollback and returning to normal life as quickly as possible is not a good idea.

So, which is the better path ahead, overall?

A point to consider.

Right now all of this is a hot partisan issue, the Dems favoring lockdown, testing, and lots of interruption of normality and the GOP favoring rollback and restoration of normal life.

In 1916, 1940, and 1964, a Democrat ran for president promising he would absolutely not send Americans to war. But each one won the election and then sent Americans to war.

Democrats could abandon lockdown, too, after the election.

But probably while maintaining lingering concerns over not-too-disruptive stuff like masks, testing, and social distancing in order to keep up differentiation from the Republican brand.

They are already edging in that direction.

And another point.

Everybody agrees geezers and people with special vulnerability should continue self-isolation and physical distancing. I certainly will. And I may never dine out at a restaurant or go to a crowded theater, ever again.

I who say this always get the flu shot, and I will get a Covid-19 vaccine as soon as I can.

Why we can't cope

America is so far from being Number 1 that we are the worst at coping with the coronavirus of all the world's richer countries.

The worst at testing, the worst at limiting contagion, the worst at keeping down deaths, the worst at limiting damage to our economy, the worst at delivering every from of relief except loot for giant corporations and Republican donors, and all for the same reason.

Republicans in office don't want any of this to work, and so they engage in manifold forms of sabotage from deliberate ineptitude to endless delay to refusal to act at all.

And the worst offender is Bozo.

What do we actually face? What about that rollback?

Even leaving aside the fact that in the fall we will have the flu to contend with.

Recently we have read of studies indicating our estimates of how many have or have had the disease are drastically wrong, and that the true number of infections, looking at several reports, could be from 20 to 85 times the official numbers, at least in the US.

And if that's true then, even if the virus dead, as some recent studies suggest, are half again more numerous than has been thought - so make the numerator half again more - the number of infected could be at least 20 times greater than thought - so make the denominator 20 times greater.

So multiply the currently accepted lethality guesstimate by 1.5/20 = 0.075 and you get not 5% or 10 % but 0.375 % to 0.75 %.

I don't really believe the numbers are truly that low, but if we're looking at studies of mortality we have to look at studies of the extent of infection, too.

We are really still way in the dark both about how many are and have been sick and about how many have been killed by this bug, and we can all thank Bozo and the idiotic Republican Party for not giving the US the vast testing program we needed two months ago and have needed every day since.

And still, given we have no vaccine and no natural immunity at least among the uninfected, we could end up with a very high rate of infection in our population if we rollback our precautions too quickly or too soon.

Infections might eventually run as high as 50 % or more.

And that would be 320,000,000 people X 0.5 (infection rate) X 0.005 (maybe the rate of lethality) = 800,000 dead Americans.

Not a great outcome.

And if the WHO is right and there turns out to be little or no natural immunity so the same virus in the same season gets to try to kill you again and again?

So that figure of 800,000 dead is actually too low to a completely unknown degree?

And what would that say about the ultimate possibility and efficacy of a vaccine?

Jeez.

None of which at all diminishes the urgency of getting rid of the dangerously stupid man in the White House and the malignantly stupid party that supports him.

Reality based politics?

How can anybody who has witnessed these last decades of increasingly ferocious partisanship by Republicans ever more crazed with hate talk about a return to political civility, cooperation, and mutual respect that have been utterly destroyed over that same period?

How can anybody who understands how the right really feels about America, today, about nonwhites, non-Christians, non-heteros, working class Americans, and the homeless and desperate not react with horror and anger?

How can anyone who sees how far they are willing to go, even attacking the foundations of democracy and the basic structures of the republic, to make the legal environment as bitterly inhospitable to consumers, borrowers, workers, nonwhites, the poor, and the elderly and as empowering as possible for the 1%, for corporations, for the moneyed elites as they can not loathe them utterly?

Silly questions, I know.

In politics as in all else, we are who we are, we feel what we feel.

Some of us, paid or not, with or against the grain of our interests, publicly and unashamedly side with the most powerful in their most unscrupulous and damaging assaults on the less.

Casting the rest of us into the more or less radical, or more or less moderate, but in any case more or less self-conscious and committed resistance.

Even in the event much to be hoped for, a Biden victory, the Democrats will be able to mitigate and undo the damage done so far by these bastards only if they can override the most bitter opposition from the now constantly enraged and mouth-frothing right.

Is Biden up for that?

Are the likely Democratic leaders in the house and the senate?

Will they pack the Supreme Court, as they must to secure the future of a century of progressive achievements of all kinds and not only those based on the right to privacy?

Will they trample to dust all remnants of the senate filibuster, a change without which what needs to be done in that body will certainly not be done?

Both those moves would be entirely constitutional and yet furiously protested in the right wing media as revolutionary, a coup d’état, dictatorship, and so on in their usual, hoarse-throat shouting style.

Could our Dems withstand all that pressure?

Or are they, figuratively speaking, just so many hapless Social Democrats or other republican losers in Germany or Italy between the wars?