Year: 2020

I Credit Smart Phones

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Protests against inequality and police brutality that were once limited to the slums and their immediate neighbors are now moving to wealthier neighborhoods, as technology, particularly smart phones allow organizers to organize more distant locales.

This is a good thing. Protests SHOULD afflict the comfortable:

In the years since American cities erupted in anger in the 1960s, many of the conditions that fueled that unrest — even with the ideas drafted to address them — have changed little. Most deeply poor urban neighborhoods have remained that way. Schools that for a time grew more integrated have resegregated. Aggressive policing has continued as a defining feature of urban life for young black men.

………

In Chicago, protesters have converged on Michigan Avenue, the city’s famous strip of high-end retail. In Atlanta, it has been affluent Buckhead. In Philadelphia, Center City. In New York, SoHo. In Los Angeles, protest leaders have deliberately steered toward upscale neighborhoods, including downtown and Beverly Hills.

………

There is limited symbolism in a store hit by opportunistic looting. But historians have noted the shifting geography of protest. In 1964 in Philadelphia, black neighborhoods along Columbia Avenue and North Broad Street were damaged, Thomas Sugrue, a historian at N.Y.U., pointed out. This time, high-end Chestnut and Walnut Streets around Rittenhouse Square downtown were hit over the weekend, before unrest spread through much of the city. In Los Angeles, where Watts was a site of unrest in 1960s, now Rodeo Drive is one instead.

This is good.

Logan Paul???? Logan F%$#ing Paul?!?!?! Seriously?!?!?!

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✊🏼✊✊🏾✊🏽✊🏿 pic.twitter.com/dl14Xz5X5y

— Logan Paul (@LoganPaul) June 2, 2020

Beyond Surreal

This is Logan Paul, who is known for having a YouTube following in the 8 figures, taking pictures of himself (and a corpse) in a Japanese suicide forest, and many other feats of stupid entitled white boi tricks, just unleashed a tirade against racism and white privilege, which considering his audience, is pretty amazing.

To quote my son, “If the situation that we’re in is enough to make Logan F%$#ing Paul start to speak rationally and responsibly, we’re in some deep sh%$.”

This is as a profound a statement against his own interest as I have seen in a very long time.

Nothing of Value was Lost

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The morning after in Richmond, Virginia – where they burned the Daughters of the Confederacy building and hung a noose around Jefferson Davis’ neck. pic.twitter.com/BdYWGAf6re

— Mallory Noe-Payne (@MalloryNoePayne) May 31, 2020

Not sure how I feel about the noose

During protests over the police murder of George Floyd, protestors set fire to the United Daughters of the Confederacy headquarters.

Given the reality of the situation in the United States, perhaps they should share a building with the Benedict Arnold memorial.

What, there is no Benedict Arnold memorial building?

Well, there shouldn’t be a United Daughters of the Confederacy building either.

You and your treasonous ancestors can go f%$# themselves.

Corrupt Violent Thugs

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I am referring to, of course, of the Sergeant’s Benevolent Association of New York City, who just published the arrest report of mayor Bill de Blasio’s daughter’s arrest for participating in a protest with a tweet.

This is blatantly illegal, and there is a whole chain of command that was behind this.

And still de Blasio is shilling for the NYPD, even though he was elected on promises of reforming that department, and even though he cannot run again for mayor because of term limits.

I guess that cringing becomes becomes second nature with enough practice:

Among the hundreds of protesters arrested over the four days of demonstrations in New York City over the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, only one was highlighted by name by a police union known for its hostility toward Mayor Bill de Blasio.

The name of that protester? Chiara de Blasio, the mayor’s daughter.

The union, the Sergeants Benevolent Association, used Twitter to post a police report documenting the arrest on Saturday night of Ms. de Blasio, 25.

The Police Department does not normally release internal police reports, and Ms. de Blasio’s contained personal details, including her height, weight, address, date of birth and driver’s license information.

The post was removed for violation of Twitter rules, and the union’s account was suspended Monday morning.

“The account is temporarily locked for violating our private information policy,” a Twitter spokesman confirmed.

Citing safety concerns, Twitter prohibits users from posting other people’s “private information” without their consent, a practice known as “doxxing.”

This a deeply corrupt, and deeply corrupting, action made by principals in the Sergeants Benevolent Association, and it needs to be treated as the crime (felony) that it is.

This is an active conspiracy against civilian oversight of the police force, so it is not just a matter of petty corruption, it is an act reminiscent of a secret police.

They Intended to Break the Law

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Louisville police came upon a gathering, a restauranteur serving food to the neighborhood during curfew, and turned off their body cameras and opened fire on the crowd.

The mayor of Louisville fired the police chief, so he knew what was going on.

The cops were “On Safari”, looking for some black heads to bust, and so they went out with their body cameras off, and something went pear shaped, and they murdered a pillar of the community.

The FBI and the state police are investigating:

A city reeling from four straight nights of violent protests woke Monday to learn that the owner of a beloved West End eatery had been shot by police and National Guards troops responding to gunfire.

David McAtee, known in the Russell neighborhood for his popular barbeque stand outside of Dino’s Food Mart, was killed early Monday morning as Louisville Metro Police and National Guard were trying to break up a “large crowd” in the parking lot of the mart at West Broadway and 26th Street. He was 53.

Gov. Andy Beshear ordered Kentucky State Police to investigate the shooting, which will be a joint effort between the FBI Louisville Field Office and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District, federal officials said.

Hours after the governor publicly asked Louisville officials to release a “significant” amount of body camera footage from the incident “as soon as possible,” the city announced there wasn’t any.

Two LMPD officers involved in the shooting either had failed to activate or were not wearing body cameras during the incident, Mayor Greg Fischer told the public Monday night.

The mayor also said Monday he fired LMPD Chief Steven Conrad, who announced he would retire at the end of June amid mounting public pressure following the police killing of 26-year-old ER technician Breonna Taylor.

………

Surveillance footage and police radio transmissions released by LMPD Monday evening offered no clear-cut answers.

However, “dozens” of officers were at the scene, according to the recordings. Several protesters and Russell residents there Monday afternoon questioned why so many officers and troops were present in the first place before the shooting.

The most significant protest Sunday night was roughly 20 blocks away downtown.

………

McAtee’s body was at the scene until at least Monday afternoon. A group of LMPD officers in face shields formed a line just behind the crime scene tape, facing neighbors and protesters who came out throughout the day.

This stinks to high heaven, and these officers need to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

Well, Now We Know What Ends Both-Siderism Among Journalists

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All you have to do to make them look at the actual facts is to put them in the line of fire.

Then, suddenly the press sees that out of control cops are out of control cops.

It really sucks that the only way to get the press to stop it’s lazy equivalencies is to actually physically harm them.

This is not indicative of people who are good at their job:

The targeting, harassment, shooting and arrest of working journalists by police over the last several days is having a significant — maybe even profound — effect on the coverage of the mass demonstrations over the death of George Floyd.

 It’s a shift from watching the protests through the eyes of the police to watching the police through the eyes of the protesters.

 It’s a shift from seeing the police primarily as sources and protectors to seeing them as subjects and aggressors.

 Exhibit A is the lead story in the New York Times print edition on Monday morning, which, instead of dutifully reporting on the official version of clashes around the nation, boldly addressed the reality that police around the country have been responding to protests against their aggression with yet more of the same, and have themselves been inciting more violence.

 ………

 The authors also wrote that shows of force by highly-militarized police weren’t bringing calm. “Instead, some people said, it was escalating tensions and serving as a reminder of the regular use of military equipment and tactics by local police forces.”

 ………

 This sentence struck me as both incredibly naïve and – at the same time – nothing short of revolutionary:

Now, some are questioning whether tough police tactics against demonstrators are actually making the violence worse rather than quelling it.

………

Slate collected a number of social media clips and very effectively aggregated them under the headline: “Police Erupt in Violence Nationwide.”

So, it’s clear how you get journalists to start reporting, and stop cultivating sources:  You just need to make sure that someone beats the crap out of them.

It’s a hell of a state of affairs.

The Princess Bride as Prophecy

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It turns out that as a result of anthropogenic climate change, the tundra is turning into a real-world version of the fire swamp.

There has been an upsurge in smoldering fires persisting through the winter to reemerge in the spring:

The bitterly cold Arctic winter typically snuffs out the seasonal wildfires that erupt in this region. But every once in a while, a wildfire comes along that refuses to die.

These blazes, known as “zombie fires” or “holdover fires,” can burrow into the rich organic material beneath the surface, such as the vast peatlands that ring the Arctic, and smolder under the snowpack throughout the frigid winter.

With the Siberian Arctic seeing record warm conditions in recent weeks and months, scientists monitoring Arctic wildfire trends are becoming more convinced that some of the blazes erupting in the Arctic this spring are actually left over from last summer.

………

The drying and burning of Arctic peatlands has major consequences for the planet as a whole. Northern peatlands contain more stored carbon than rainforests do, Waddington said. He compared fires that smolder during the winter without flames, only to reignite in the spring, to scenes from the fire swamp in the 1987 comedy “The Princess Bride,” which features bursts of flame emerging from underground.

(emphasis mine)

This would be cool, if it weren’t presaging the destruction of the world.

I’m Impressed

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Bus deiver unions nationwide have announced that they will refuse to transport protesters to detention for the police.

People are noticing that hte police are actively stoking the violence, and refusing to support them:

Friday evening, bus drivers in New York City and members of TWU Local 100 refused to cooperate with police in transporting arrested Justice for George Floyd protestors.

The action comes a day after bus drivers in Minneapolis also refused to assist the police in transporting arrested protestors; shutting down the Twin Cities’ transit system.

“I told MTA our ops won’t be used to drive cops around. It is in solidarity [with Minneapolis’ bus drivers],” JP Patafio, vice president of TWU Local 100 told Motherboard.

Payday Report has learned that transit union leaders nationwide are instructing members not to cooperate with police in arresting protestors.

When juxtaposed with mainstream stories condemning the over-reaction of the police departments, see here, here, and here, this is a welcome development.

I just hope that this sticks.

The Impact of Police Unions

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I came across a fascinating Twitter thread about the effect of police unions upon on law enforcement.

The study is preliminary, and the author is very clear on this, but the results are striking.

Police unionization has increased pay and benefits, no big surprise there, and a slight decline in police employment, which might correlate with the increase in the cost, which is also not a surprise.

The big take away is that there is a substantial increase in the lethality of law enforcement, with the death toll of minorities accounting for the bulk of the increase.

The number (admittedly preliminary) is stunning, “We find a substantial increase in police killings of civilians over the medium to long run (likely after unions are established) with an additional 0.026 to 0.029 civilians killed in a county each year of whom the overwhelming majority are non-white.”

Given that there are (Googling furiously) 3,143 county equivalents in the United States, this means that we would see about 82 extra deaths a year, and over the past 40 years, this would be more than 3200 excess deaths.

The obvious conclusion is that the decrease in accountability of police officers has resulted in increased violence and police racism, though as is frequently stated, correlation is not causation.

Additionally, court rulings over the past 50+ years have had the effect of reducing police accountability for the use of force as well, so teasing out the effects specific reductions of accountability would be difficult.

The obvious take-away though is that we need greater accountability for our police forces.

Great Googly Moogly………

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Believe it or not, this is a cat


Happy ending

The Humane Society of Arizona collected a cat from its now dead owner, and its matted fur was so extensive that they were originally unsure what sort of animal it was.

After removing 2 pounds of fur, from what appears to be an 8 pound cat, (25% of its body weight!) we can see that it is a cat.

What’s more, some person or persons could see that this 4 year old queen* was a majestic specimen of the species Felis catus, and adopted her 2 days later.

Her name is “Fluffers.”

H/t Naked Capitalism.

*Queen is a female cat. A male cat is a Tom.

Of Course They Aren’t………

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Trump and his Evil Minions™ are refusing to release economic projections for the upcoming quarter, probably because they have run the numbers, and they are unbelievably f%$#ing grim.

I am not sure if this is reelection campaign thing, or they are just worried about the tantrum that Trump would throw if they released the data.

It really does not matter what reason they have for this, it’s a thoroughly cowardly move:

White House officials have decided not to release updated economic projections this summer, opting against publishing forecasts that would almost certainly codify an administration assessment that the coronavirus pandemic has led to a severe economic downturn, according to three people with knowledge of the decision.

The White House is supposed to unveil a federal budget proposal every February and then typically provides a “mid-session review” in July or August with updated projections on economic trends such as unemployment, inflation and economic growth.

Budget experts said they were not aware of any previous White House opting against providing forecasts in this “mid-session review” document in any other year since at least the 1970s.

………

“It gets them off the hook for having to say what the economic outlook looks like,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office who served as an economic adviser to the late senator John McCain (R-Ariz.).

The Disturbances

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And they wonder why people make porcine references

What is clear is that there have been an outbreak of demonstrations against police officers murdering black men with impunity.

What is also clear is that these protests are largely peaceful until the police riot, and so escalate the situation.

Police, and those above them in the chain of command, appear to be constitutionally incapable of deescalating protests against them.

While this won’t be discussed by the major news media, who are wringing their hands over a f%$#ing Target being looted, most of the violence and disruption has been initiated by police, even if you don’t believe (I am on the fence) that a significant proportion of those initiating property crimes and vandalism are not in some way police agents.

This, “You must respect my authoritay!” crap is getting old.

Today in Evil

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It’s Amazon’s turn, and Amazon has been so bad about protecting its workers, and giving any information to its employees about outbreaks at warehouses, that its employees have set up trackers so that they can know when they are being endangered by the company:

Usually Jana Jumpp works nights loading trucks at an Amazon facility the size of 28 football fields in Jeffersonville, Ind. Now, she spends them shut in her room, clacking away on her sluggish computer.

The emails and Facebook messages from Amazon workers at warehouses across the country tumble in.

………

Jumpp has a counterpart at Amazon-owned Whole Foods, Katie Doan, who has been collecting cases since April 2. The two women have never spoken, but they describe nearly identical work fielding a torrent of private messages, searching Facebook groups, Reddit, Twitter and news outlets for reports of infections, and meticulously updating Google documents with the numbers.

Jumpp and Doan, who until this week worked at a store in Tustin, a city in Orange County, say they do this because their co-workers don’t feel safe; they aren’t able to gauge the risk of reporting for work to their warehouse or store because Amazon won’t tell them how many people are believed to have gotten infected there.

As of Wednesday, 343 Whole Foods workers had tested positive, according to crowdsourced data in a publicly available Google document. Of those, 44 cases are in 24 store locations across California. At least Four Whole Foods employees have died, including a manager at a store in Pasadena.

Amazon’s response is typical corporate bullsh%$

………

Yet Amazon has challenged the notion that it should be providing fuller data. An Amazon spokesperson said the company does track the information at a site level but does not release the aggregate numbers because those numbers might contain outdated information — cases that were resolved weeks or months ago — and thus are not informative to workers.

………

Dr. David Eisenman, director of the Center for Public Health and Disasters at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, disagreed. He said that type of data, correctly gathered, is crucial for reducing future infections of employees and understanding which kinds of job sites and occupations carry elevated risk of contracting COVID-19.

“Saying aggregate data is not useful is like pulling wool over your eyes. Of course it’s useful, we’re using it to open the country up again,” Eisenman said.

Yet another reason to hate Amazon.

Who Had the 2020 Over and Under for Super-Volcano?

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There have been a series of mild earthquakes which may indicate that the Yellowstone super-volcano might be becoming active again:

Monitoring services from the US Geological Survey (USGS) found there have been 213 earthquakes in the Yellowstone National Park in the past 28 days. The tremors were relatively small, with the largest being a 2.1 magnitude tremor on May 22.

However, some experts warn it is not necessarily the size of an earthquake which is an indicator a volcano might erupt, but the quantity of them.

Portland State University Geology Professor Emeritus Scott Burns said: “If you get swarms under a working volcano, the working hypothesis is that magma is moving up underneath there.”

But others disagree about whether an earthquake swarm near a volcano could be a sign of things to come.

Jamie Farrell at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City believes this is just part of the natural cycle for Yellowstone volcano, saying: “Earthquake swarms are fairly common in Yellowstone.

“There is no indication that this swarm is related to magma moving through the shallow crust.”

The Yellowstone supervolcano, located in the US state of Wyoming, last erupted on a major scale 640,000 years ago.

As an FYI, when the Yellowstone Supervolcano (also called the Yellowstone Caldera) last erupted, it put something on the order of 100 km3 material into the air, with heavy ash falls as far away as 1000 miles away.

Additionally, it would likely precipitate a climate catastrophe with widespread crop failures and famine.

I know that the chance of something happening is tiny, but if that doesn’t sound like a 2020 thing to you, you have not been paying attention.

About F%$#ing Time

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It looks like people are starting to look at Rat-Face Andy’s record as governor during the Corona Virus, and his heroic façade is is curmbling.

It’s good to see the world to come around to my point of the view about the Governor of New York:

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo made it very clear who was in charge as the coronavirus began to infiltrate his state. The governor — in near-daily nationally televised appearances — said he would make difficult but necessary choices to contain the spread and would take the blame for any negative effects on New Yorkers’ lives.

“The buck stops on my desk,” Cuomo said to both a New York and national audience on March 17, after ordering bars and restaurants to close across the state. “Your local mayor did not close your restaurants, your bars, your gyms or your schools. I did. I did. I assume full responsibility. … If you are upset by what we have done, be upset at me.”

Two and a half months into the crisis, Cuomo’s take-charge attitude has begun to soften. The governor, who gained legions of fans for his briefings that blended an authoritative tone with a personal touch, is increasingly on the defensive — and casting blame on the federal government and its guidance.

………

The limelight’s fade coincides with mounting scrutiny of New York state’s response to the crisis, particularly in nursing homes, where more than 5,700 residents have died from Covid-19. A growing body of research is finding that earlier shutdown measures could have averted many of the state’s more than 23,700 fatalities.

“It’s ludicrous. You can’t one day say you can blame me and the buck stops with me, and the next day pass the buck to anyone besides yourself,” said Assembly Member Ron Kim (D-Queens), who has previously clashed with Cuomo.

………

The limelight’s fade coincides with mounting scrutiny of New York state’s response to the crisis, particularly in nursing homes, where more than 5,700 residents have died from Covid-19. A growing body of research is finding that earlier shutdown measures could have averted many of the state’s more than 23,700 fatalities.

“It’s ludicrous. You can’t one day say you can blame me and the buck stops with me, and the next day pass the buck to anyone besides yourself,” said Assembly Member Ron Kim (D-Queens), who has previously clashed with Cuomo.

………

The governor has drawn particular criticism for his policy of sending recovering Covid-19 patients to nursing homes, which he effectively reversed this month — even as he denied the change was a reversal at all. State officials say the nature of the fast-moving and unprecedented crisis forced the state to follow national guidance on the issue.

………

Manhattan Assemblymember Richard Gottfried, a Democrat and chair of the Assembly’s health committee, is among state lawmakers calling for an independent investigation of the state’s handling of the outbreak in nursing homes. He says the blame rests largely on decades of ignoring issues that became more acute during the pandemic.

“The federal government never told New York to tolerate low staffing levels in nursing homes or to have a lax or understaffed enforcement of health and safety safeguards in nursing homes,” Gottfried said. “The executive branch — going back decades — has done that all by itself.”

Cuomo was behind de Blasio on addressing this, and Bill de Blasio was just plain late to the pandemic, and Cuomo’s antipathy to the Mayor of New York further hamstrung the response.

Additionally, he has turned the emergency legislation into yet another orgy of cronyism and corruption.

If, as some have suggested, Cuomo is the Democratic Party savior, then the Democratic Party is beyond saving.

“Only” 2.1 Million New Jobless Claims

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Yes, “Only”, 3 times as many initial claims as had ever been filed before 2020.

That’s just great:

The number of workers receiving unemployment benefits fell for the first time since February and new weekly claims continued to ease, offering evidence that layoffs related to the coronavirus pandemic are slowing.

Initial claims for unemployment benefits declined to a seasonally adjusted 2.1 million last week from 2.4 million the prior week, the Labor Department said. The level of claims is still 10 times prepandemic levels but has fallen for eight straight weeks.

Because employers are running out of people to lay off.

I will note that the recovery is not likely to be strong, because the people who are looking for work won’t have the resources to buy sh%$ once they find a new job.