The Diplomad 2.0, the blog of a retired Foreign Service officer, disappeared without a trace…it was gone for good or so I thought. Turns out that the author had some domain-name problems, and the blog is now back here.
thediplomad.blogspot.com
Protest or Insurrection?
The protests that quickly morphed into rioting and mass looting began with an arrest of a career felon for trying to pass a counterfeit bill. He had been convicted of felony home invasion and robbery in Texas and served 5 years in prison. According to several unreliable sites, he was”turning his life around” and was involved with a church. That argument is somewhat diminished by the fact that he had Methamphetamine and Fentanyl in toxic levels at autopsy. The reaction in Minneapolis was extreme and horrific.
Some of the destruction can be seen here the next day.
It got worse, much worse.
The spineless leftist Mayor is now seeking $55 million form somebody to repair damage he might have prevented.
Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey will seek state and federal aid to rebuild city structures following over a week of looting and rioting, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported Friday.
Some 220 buildings have been damaged and require at least $55 million in repairs, the city’s Community Planning & Economic Development department said earlier this week, noting that the city was “not yet ready to produce a credible estimate.” City Council members warned that the costs will likely be far higher, while Mayor Frey said damages could reach into the “hundreds of millions.”
Typically, he tried to seek approval from black rioters and was expelled from the meeting.
He was elected on a platform of fighting “global warming.”
A pretty good explanation of what is behind all this.
For white liberals, a black identity shaped by rage is not only to be condoned, but celebrated. All politics is identity politics to liberals, because the whole object of their existence is to invent one’s identity according to therapeutic needs. That is why the progressive movement took up the cause of transgender rights with such passion: To change one’s gender is the ultimate expression of self-invention in defiance of nature and tradition.
Worthwhile Reading
A long but interesting essay about Peter Thiel, who is IMO one of the more thoughtful and creative among the Silicon Valley set.
The politicization of everything…including websites like nextdoor.com, “designed for people to share useful information within a neighborhood like dates of bulky trash-pick, locations of road closings, and postings of lawn equipment for sale”…as seen by a woman who is a music historian, with a particular concentration on Russia.
Dispatches from the front lines of the knitting wars. Can these people be trusted with knitting needles? Those things can be dangerous, you know.
A post by a police officer’s wife.
Violent protest and the intelligentsia. Disturbing parallels between pre-revolutionary Russia and contemporary America.
A walk across a beach in Normandy. Today, June 6, marks the 76th anniversary of the Normandy invasion..I haven’t seen much remembance of this today.
Pollution, Food, and C19
I read a wise essay in Mother Earth News in the 1970s, which pointed out that the number of people who can live in an area without seriously polluting it is dependent on technology. With that audience, the tendency was to think much more in terms of absolute numbers. The earth has too many people! We can’t support them all! Pollution is out of control! The author noted that a solitary person living in the wild, defecating on the ground without even a trench, pollutes a sizable area. Without any food preservation or storage techniques he might need a wide area as well. Yet with technology we can build Manhattan, treating our sewage and carting it off. Transportation allows food to travel, so some can specialize in making lots of it and sending it off.
Something similar came up in the C19 discussions that I think got missed. We should be glad that it got missed, because it would only be front-and-center in our thinking if things had gone wrong. Some rural places did have the possibility that their local health systems would be overwhelmed. As there weren’t that many of them, however, they could spread the medical response to nearby hospitals and clinics. In number of cases per thousand people, Dougherty County GA (pop 90K) got hit hard – 140 deaths, as did a couple of neighboring counties. The two counties next to it with about 8,000 people each have a death rate of over twice Dougherty’s 1500/mil. Per capita, Georgia’s rural counties are doing substantially worse than Atlanta. Over 2,000 deaths per million in that SW area. I think that’s worse than NYC.
Rural counties do fine until they don’t, which I think informed a lot of the thinking early on. Once they stop doing fine, it was impossible to get help there when test kits and everything else was so lacking. An outbreak of 20 people in a rural county can quickly become less manageable than an outbreak of 200 in Boston if there’s no hospital nearby. Considering how to handle these counties will definitely have to be part of a response plan going forward. 25 deaths in a county of 8,000 may not make the news, but when you consider 3-4 times as many may have been seriously ill, that’s a lot for one group to handle.
Franklin, NH has about 8,000 people but a disproportionate number of deaths because of one nursing home, with many positives among both staff and residents, who had and have contact with the rest of the community. (There may be more to the story if I were on the ground there. I only know what I read in the papers.) The city has a regional hospital which was nearly overwhelmed, but there are three other hospitals thirty minutes away, two of which were not treating many cases at the time. I didn’t even hear about it an hour away, but the news for that region was full of anxiety and apprehension for a few weeks. Nationally, a few local systems were briefly overwhelmed. How you view that largely depends on whether the word “few,” “briefly,” or “overwhelmed” jumped out at you. Such are the things which create confirmation bias, where we reinforce some ideas without much thinking about them.
I’m Tired…
I’m tired,
Tired of playing the game
Ain’t it a crying shame
I’m so tired…
Oops, there I go, channeling Lili Van Shtüpp, the Teutonic Titwillow from the movie Blazing Saddles which cinematic offering must be about the last time we were allowed to meditate on matters racial in a mainstream entertainment offering with wit, good humor and malice towards none. Sad to say, that movie could not have been made in the last ten years, and certainly not this week. The social media meltdown would achieve nuclear levels even before production began, and by premier time would sink through the mantle of Earth to the burning core of it’s molten center, which I wouldn’t mind observing from a safe distance. Because I am tired.
Tired of a lot of things, so tired that I have gone beyond being polite and considerate of others’ feelings. Of what am I tired? Oh, liebling, let me begin the list …