NEW COLUMN: Even White Women Check Out Construction Sites While Jogging

Crime, Criminal Injustice, Justice, Law, Race

NEW COLUMN is “Even White Women Check Out Construction Sites While Jogging.” It appeared on WND, and the Unz Review, and is currently featured on American Greatness, where you can read it NOW.

And excerpt:

“Nothing unusual; its [sic] my jogging routine,” writes a Twitter user.

His sarcastic words are appended to a doctored image of joggers running through a construction site, while Ahmaud Arbery loiters in the background.

The Twitter lampoon is of the young black man, shot to death by Travis McMichael and father Gregory McMichael, in Satilla Shores, a community near Brunswick, Georgia. The incident happened on Feb. 23, 2020.

Prior to the shooting, as surveillance footage suggests, the deceased had wandered onto an open construction site, looked it over, but removed nothing from it.

The image is “funny”—only if you were not killed on your jog (real or not), ostensibly because you took a suspicious detour. Trespass, innocent or suspicious, does not warrant a death sentence.

“He’s been caught on camera a bunch at night. It’s kind of an ongoing thing,” said an anonymous caller to the 9-1-1 dispatcher, minutes before the fatal shooting.

The caller, it now transpires, was referring to surveillance footage dating back to Feb. 11, on which a younger, more slender black male can be seen strolling on the same property.

Fast forward to the 23rd, and the dispatcher is quizzing the caller as to whether a break-in was underway. “I just need to know what he was doing wrong. Was he just on the premises and not supposed to be?” That indeed seemed to be the case.

It so happens that I’m a runner who … stops at open construction sites. My bad. But they’re interesting. Especially those earthquake constraints. It’s not incorrect to state that the guy who lumbers behind me (yes, a possible relative) might have wandered into one or two such structures. He’s an engineer. They—guys in general—love construction sites. It’s a hairy-forearm relic.  Anyhoo, given the fuss, I’ll plead the Fifth.

Black and white, Americans peer at each other from behind parapets of suspicion. Hopelessly bifurcated, some condemn Ahmaud Arbery; others have canonized him. So ingrained are these positions, that parties fail to consider Freud’s funny observation.

When quizzed about his incessant cigar smoking, Freud humorously chose to sidestep what was, according to the very theory he had invented, a manifestation of his own oral fixation. He said: “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”

Arbery was training to become an electrician. Perhaps he was simply curious about the wiring and the finishes, like myself and my, err, alleged spouse? …

… READ THE REST. The complete column is “Even White Women Check Out Construction Sites While Jogging.” It is currently featured on American Greatness, where you can read it NOW.

*Image courtesy Twitter

Big Corp America Is No Country For Small Biz Or Individualism

Business, Conservatism, COVID-19, Critique, English, Ilana Mercer, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, War

Face it, we live in a country in which, increasingly, big corporations with political clout prevail in the economy. In politics, it’s the factions with the biggest corporate donors and the slimiest lobbyists: their politics and policies rule the day.

What is particularly sick-making is not only that a (subsidized) sham like “Tesla is allowed to reopen in defiance of the shelter in place order,” applied diligently to small companies—but that Tesla doesn’t care to protect its employees.

Hardly a good corporate citizen.

“Resentment Builds When COVID-19 Reopening Rules Apply To Some Businesses, But Not Others“:

“At the beginning we immediately closed our store, shut off our lights, put up messages to the community saying ‘we’re all in this together and we’ll be back,” said Marcy Simon, co-owner of Ashby Flowers.
But even now, the tiny shop is not allowed to bring flowers outside for curbside pickup by customers. It’s legal in the rest of Alameda County but Berkeley has its own health rules that say florists can only deliver. Meanwhile large Whole Foods Market right next to it–which also sells flowers—has a long line of people waiting to get inside.
Simon is like a lot of others who thought they were doing the right thing, but are now starting to get mad.
“I think that many people are now definitely looking for ways to get around the rules, there’s no question about it,” she said.
Clinical psychologist Judye Hess says that shouldn’t be a surprise. She says people naturally lose respect for laws when it feels like they’re being unfairly applied.

This mentality applies across the board. How many times, over 20 years, have I heard the shameless refrain from conservative outlets that, “We won’t syndicate a column that doesn’t come from the major syndicator”? To be syndicated by a major syndicator you have to parrot received opinion pretty much on everything. Neither can you be a stylistically risque, interesting writer. With few exceptions, monotony of style and mind are a must if you are to be syndicated.

Other than “too idiosyncratic,” there were the other refrains around the time my column was first syndicated unsuccessfully (2001 or 2002), chief among them were these: “You are neither Republican nor Democrat. And you don’t support Bush’s war.” (The Iraq onslaught was supported by most members of the duopoly.)

The idea that the gritty little gal or guy carries the day, or that individualism is cherished in the USA: These are fallacies in my experience.

*Image via Mises

UPDATED (5/19): COVID-FREE COUNTRIES Closed Their Countries

COVID-19, Government, IMMIGRATION, Nationhood, Science

Aside from being utterly First World in their scientific approach to COVID control, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea and Taiwan are almost COVID free because of the tightest border closures possible, down to a “halt to international tourism” in New Zealand. Even backpackers and seasonal workers have been kept out.

South Korea quarantines all travelers:

They are tested on arrival and, if negative, can travel widely on the condition that they answer when called by health workers and diligently record any symptoms in an app. Taiwan is permitting some business visitors, too, subject to quarantine rules.

Reports the Economist on the luxury and gift of “contemplating life beyond the virus.” Yes, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea and Taiwan have got the governance the US and certainly the UK lack.

In New Zealand, a country of 5m people, new cases have been in the single digits for most of the past week. Australia reported just seven new infections on April 23rd. That puts the pair in the very small group of countries that seem to have vanquished covid-19, including South Korea and, barring a fresh wave of infections from a recent outbreak on a naval vessel, Taiwan. …

[The] strictest border controls [have been implemented]. At present, almost all foreigners are barred from entering New Zealand, while returning citizens are placed in quarantine for 14 days in monitored hotels. Arrivals have slowed to a trickle: on April 22nd not a single person entered the country.

Ports are tightly controlled, too. Stevedores at Auckland’s work in small, isolated teams, each with their own toilet, to reduce the risk of an infection spreading widely. The crews of arriving ships are not allowed to disembark and can interact with only three port workers, who are distinguished by pink high-visibility vests, not to mention face masks.

The government’s economic models assume New Zealand will have to stay closed to foreigners for a year. But some doubt it is feasible, or worthwhile, to keep the borders sealed. Steven Joyce, a former finance minister, says eliminating the virus is “pie in the sky”. Australia’s Chief Medical Officer, Brendan Murphy, says that although elimination is desirable, “We’re pretty doubtful that could be maintained for the long term given the incredible border measures you would need to have.”

 

MORE. “What next for countries that are nearly covid-free? Australia, New Zealand, South Korea and Taiwan contemplate life beyond the virus”

UPDATE (5/19):

Nate Silver’s Pandemic Observations As ‘Sharp’ As His Prediction About Trump’s Election

Argument, COVID-19, Intelligence, Republicans, Science, THE ELITES

Nate Silver, a statistician, is a mediocre mind.

In this “glorious commonwealth of morons”—H. L. Mencken’s description, not mine—there are many minds even more mediocre than Silver’s, who hype and highlight his banal observations. In the context of the coronavirus, I imagine this is motivated by their own pandemic politics.

But first, to Mr. Silver’s political prognostications during Donald Trump’s election campaign. As  chronicled in my June 29 book, The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed:

… whether they’re missing the Trump phenom or the casus belli for war in Iraq—America’s deeply stupid, self-anointed cognoscenti recognize truth only once card-carrying members arrive at it independently, grasp and broadcast it, sometimes years too late. Not so the marginalized writers of America. Not in 2012, but in 2002 did we pinpoint the wrongness of the Iraq War. And not in 2016, but on July 19, 2015—when this chronicle began—did some of us, not fortuitously, finger Trump as “a candidate to ‘kick the crap out of all the politicians’” and “send the system’s sycophants scattering.” (August 14, 2015). His appeal, as this writer has contended since late in 2015, transcended left and right, at the time.

Conversely, vaunted statistician Nate Silver ‘calculated that Trump’s support was “about the same share of people who think the Apollo moon landings were faked.”

No wonder Professor Tyler Cowen of George Mason University properly downgraded wonder boy Silver’s intellectual prowess. His prose, ventured Cowen, was a sprawl that “evinces a greater affiliation to rigor with data analysis than to rigor with philosophy of science or, for that matter, rigor with rhetoric,” wrote the good teacher, adding that to him, the Silver columns are “tweener” pieces, “too superficial for smart and informed readers, yet on topics which are too abstruse for the more casual readers.”

(MORE in “The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed”.)

Now, Nate, that national treasure, is back. This time, he is constructing a straw argument on Fox News, to say nothing of wading into coronavirus politics. I thought he was an objective numbers man?

Nate states the obvious, saying that, “By focusing on coronavirus case counts, the media … makes the numbers look superficially worse … [since]… increases in testing [are what] have led to more cases being diagnosed.”

D’oh! And so obviously true. Does Nate really need to state the obvious? I guess so. (Meanwhile, Silver calls out others for their “boringly conventional positions in … political punditry.”)

The more fundamental point is this: Certainly in the U.S, the coronavirus case count is less significant than the death count: rates and absolute numbers. (Which is why, presumably, Ron Unz highlighted mortality in “The Government Employee Who May Have Saved a Million American Lives.“)

America’s case count, moreover, is scandalously inaccurate. According to the Economist:

Throughout April the number of daily tests has averaged around 150,000, with the share of positive tests staying around 20%. That suggests America is testing only people who are probably infected (in Taiwan, for instance, one in every 132 tests is positive), which in turn suggests that many mild or asymptomatic cases are going undetected. America may have 15 to 20 times more actual infected people than confirmed cases.

That more people are infected is a double-edged sword: More people infected means more people infecting other, but also, we hope, more population-level immunity.

A much more meaningful and reliable number is mortality, death rates and absolute numbers. Right now, the latter stands at 80,037. RIP.

@ The Unz Review.

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