Category: Blithe Spirit

The good and the bad, emphasis on Trib and Sun-Times

Mayor L picks her to co-chair new use-of-force committee, she cuts loose with attack on “psychopaths with guns” who “have circled the community with a shield of violence . . .

. . .  too often forcing the natural aggression of the black community inwards.”

That’s from Angela Davis,” she said, referring to the [communist] author and political activist.

She da woman!

Arewa Karen Winters, of Justice for Families, speaks during a press conference at City Hall to announce the city’s new Use of Force Working Group, designed to to review the Chicago Police Department’s policies pertaining to use of force, Monday morning, June 15, 2020. Winters will co-chair the Use of Force Working Group, alongside the police department’s Area 4 Deputy Chief Ernest Cato III.

The police union head to the mayor: “I can’t have dialogue with people who are so far to one side of the fringe that it’s just pointless.”

“If you cater to that squeaky wheel, people are going to be distracted from your lack of a plan for the riots and everything else that has taken place in this city in the last month that you did nothing to stop.” 

Read it all at Police union slams co-chair of new panel reviewing CPD use-of-force policy – Chicago Sun-Times

Lockdown is good for the climate. But it’s a damn the economy, full speed ahead strategy. We could also stop eating and leave the planet to the birds and fish, who thrive during lockdown. However . . .

. . . We can also ask what about the people?

“We have to head toward the new normality because the national economy and the well-being of the people depends on it,” says Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

Or as Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan wrote on Twitter, “We sought a total lockdown without thinking about the consequences for the daily wage earners, the street vendors, the laborers, all of whom face poverty and hunger. . . . May Allah forgive us.”

Indeed.

via Coronavirus and the Climate – WSJ

Lockdowns Hit Minority Businesses. More than Depression years.

Questions loom for state and city decision-makers.

If Covid-19 cases keep rising in the weeks to come, city and state leaders might reimpose a strict lockdown. They should bear in mind who’d be harmed most by the ensuing economic destruction. From February to April, the number of active black business owners fell 41%, according to an analysis last week from the National Bureau of Economic Research.

“This study provides the first estimates of the early-stage effects of COVID-19 on small business owners,” writes Robert Fairlie, an economist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Overall, he finds, “the number of working business owners plummeted from 15.0 million in February 2020 to 11.7 million in April 2020.” That’s a drop of 3.3 million, or 22%.

This shock is unprecedented. “No other one-, two- or even 12-month window of time has ever shown such a large change in business activity,” Mr. Fairlie says. “For comparison, from the start to end of the Great Recession the number of business owners decreased by 730,000 representing only a 5 percent reduction.” Judging by the number of active small businesses, the Covid lockdown was the equivalent, in only weeks, of four Great Recessions.

Four big ones. Is it worth it? Does it make a difference?

More here: WSJ

Argentine bishop accused of sexual misconduct returns to work at Vatican central bank

When will it ever end?

ROSARIO, Argentina – As the Vatican resumed its activities after the two-month COVID-19 coronavirus lockdown, Crux has confirmed an Argentinian bishop suspended over allegations of sexual misconduct with seminarians quietly went back to work.

Bishop Gustavo Zanchetta was appointed by Francis to the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See (APSA), which functions as the Vatican’s central bank, in 2017, where he works as an “assessor,” a position created for the Argentine.

Habemus papam (We have a pope), the white smoke announces.

We do? Not a political strings-puller?

More here: Argentine bishop accused of sexual misconduct returns to work at Vatican central bank

Scoop: Trump’s loyalty cop clashes with agency heads, which has Axios on the alert

For some reason, POTUS does not trust people within his administration, and Axios is concerned about that.

Why it matters: This campaign — helmed by Trump’s loyalty enforcer, a 30-year-old former body man [?] who now runs hiring for the government — is part of the systematic purging or reassigning of those deemed insufficiently supportive of Trump.

The effort’s pace has alarmed top officials, according to 11 current and former [unnamed] officials with direct knowledge of the situation.

Oh boy, call the media cops. As if POTUS had any reason to himself being concerned, his underlings have been so good to him. Unless you consider cooperators and instigators of the recently completed impeachment procedures and the like.

(By the way, would have been nice to read an assessment of Obama’s appointing habits back in the day. Axios could have run a comparison of an Obama story with the equally conscientious stories they ran then. If they did so, of course.

I Binged (Microsoft’s Google) this to check my implications here. My phrase, “trump’s history of being screwed by his staff,” did not recognize the problem, giving me dozens of cases of his screwing, not one of being screwed. “Trump’s history” meant one thing to the search machine, his bad history. Bad, bad, bad.

I tried a hit-over-the-head “deep state betrays trump,” came up with https://deepstatejournal.com/. which I will have to look at. It goes after this kind of betrayal 100%, a quick perusal tells me. It’s a sleek operation, but with no staffers named, nor anyone else responsible.

Stories are red meat to Trumpsters, would be best used and understood as tips and maybe good ones at that. But main stream? Forget about it, unless the ed pages of Wall St. Journal, NY Post, Instapundit and the like, at which I almost never swear, on which I do so often.

via  Axios

Al Sharpton remembered . . .

An oldie but baddie . . .

Chicago Newspapers

“Reverend Al” — still around, still unrepentant.

America should never forget their names: Garnette Ramantar, Kareem Brunner, Olga Garcia, Angeline Marrero, Cynthia Martinez, Luz Ramos, and Mayra Rentas. These seven innocent people were murdered on Dec. 8, 1995, when a deranged supporter of Al Sharpton burst into Freddie’s Fashion Mart, shot four people and set fire to the Jewish-owned business on Harlem’s 125th Street.

Everyone who knows the story of how Sharpton’s shakedown protests against “white interlopers” incited the Freddie’s Fashion Mart massacre must consider Sharpton permanently tainted as a murderous hatemonger.

Don’t matter. He got flair, says what people wanna hear.

. . .  there he was on every TV network this week, preaching the eulogy for George Floyd. That his sermon was a species of blasphemy should surprise no one, for Sharpton is a liar and, as Jesus told the scribes and Pharisees, the devil is the…

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Your Silence Isn’t Enough, say progressives. Say what we want you to say . . .

. . . or else:

If you’ve followed the news in recent weeks, you’ll have noticed that the Left’s social-justice brigades have not cooled in their passion for banishing speech with which they disagree. But these days have also revealed a more dangerous tactic: conscripting speech by means of social pressure. Instead of enforcing strict silence, progressives aim to craft a public square in which we are all obliged to echo their views.

Zombies themselves, they want to make the rest of us zombies too. Robots, parrots mouthing slogans.

It is abundantly clear that social-justice activists — and, increasingly, mainstream left-wing Americans — do not intend to relent in wielding the cultural power of rage mobs to erase all trace of contrary opinions.

In support of which the writer cites (1) NYT self-reversal in re: publishing Sen. Cotton op-ed favoring use of troops to quell insurrections in several cities, (2) ditto Saints’ future hall of fame qb in re: dissing the flag, and (3)

. . .the progressive writer at Vox . . . bullied by his peers on the Left into deleting tweets that acknowledged he had been wrong to think campus silencing tactics would stay confined to the campus. The irony was breathtaking to behold.

Campus silencing tactics? How can you say that. Delete those tweets, you fool, or be socially deleted. He did so, of course. So did another Vox writer, “shamed into apologizing for having uttered the heretical view that perhaps rushing to defund or abolish the police — as activists are now demanding — might not be the most prudent course of action.”