Guess who wrote it? It was his first single, and it didn’t do well:
The cover is better and extremely different, but it’s the same old song (with a different meaning since you’ve been gone). And no, they’re not wrapped up like a douche:
Target’s CEO Brian Cornell on George Floyd
Here’s what Cornell had to say:
Target CEO Brian Cornell has been particularly outspoken about the murder of George Floyd last year by former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who was convicted of the crime last week.
“It happened only blocks from our headquarters,” the CEO of the Minnesota-based retail giant told the Economic Club of Chicago on Tuesday. “My first reaction watching on TV was that could have been one of my Target team members.”
Does Cornell mean that he thought Floyd could have been a Target team member because of the geographic proximity? And would he have said the same of Chauvin and the other police, who were just as close to headquarters? Or was he talking about Floyd’s race, meaning that Target employs many black people and is trying to employ more (Cornell’s talk was in part about that)? Or is it that Floyd was a human being, and Target employs humans? Does he believe that Target team members would regularly resist arrest as a matter of course, or would be passing bad checks?
And what of Cornell’s second reactions, or third reactions, or present ideas on the subject? Does he still think Floyd could have been a Target team member? After all, Floyd had a lengthy rap sheet, and this already was known quite quickly after Floyd’s death, and
it includes a robbery at gunpoint.
Is Cornell hiring violent felons as part of his Target team? Just curious. Does Cornell even know anything about Floyd’s criminal record? Curious also.
{NOTE: If you want to see that part of Cornell’s talk – or the whole thing – you can find it here at around 7:45. From what I could tell in context (I didn’t watch the entire thing, though), he doesn’t seem to have had second or third thoughts about Floyd and the Target team.]
The FBI’s war on the right
As Ace writes:
The US government has finally found an enemy it can defeat in war: American citizens.
Starting quite a few years ago, federal agencies and the left were intent on downplaying terrorism on the left as well as Islamic extremist terrorism, and promoting the idea that it was terrorism on the right that was the real and much more serious problem.
The January 6th incursion played into their hands, giving them the opportunity to exaggerate what was happening and whip up the idea that it was an insurrection and that the perpetrators had killed people. Although the facts did not support that, it hasn’t stopped the left and agencies such as the FBI and the DOJ from acting as though they did, and cracking down far harder on the right than they have on the left.
For example [emphasis mine]:
Paul and Marilyn Hueper, owners of Homer Inn & Spa, woke with a start at 9 a.m. April 28 when a dozen armed FBI agents kicked down their front door in an investigation associated with Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s stolen laptop, which was taken during the Jan. 6 siege of the nation’s Capitol.
Speaking April 29 to Kenai-based radio host Bob Bird of the Bird’s Eye View, Paul recalled that he was alarmed and shocked to come out of his bedroom with seven guns pointing at him and his wife.
“It was a little alarming when I turned around the corner,” Paul said. “The first thing they did was start barking out commandments.”
Ultimately, the couple was handcuffed and interrogated for the better part of three hours before being released. In the end, it was a case of mistaken identity.
The Huepers were in D.C. for the rally with President Trump, but they never came close to entering the Capitol, and certainly never took Pelosi’s laptop.
They were supposedly identified by the fact that Marilyn had a hairdo and a coat similar to those worn by a woman who is under suspicion, but the women don’t otherwise resemble each other. So in addition to the overkill of the way the Huepers were treated by the FBI, we have the now-familiar utter incompetence and/or negligence of the FBI. And we also have further evidence of how our present-day near-constant surveillance enables the authorities to track just about anyone.
I doubt most people will learn about this raid. And of the ones who do, how many will be outraged, and how many will think it’s perfectly reasonable and clearly justified?
And then there’s the FBI raid on Rudy Giuliani, just one of several that were conducted on Donald Trump’s lawyers over the past few years. It was executed in connection with an investigation of a possible FARA violation, one of those handily complex laws that are often used against political rivals (for example, General Flynn was threatened with a FARA charge against him and his son).
Different treatment for different parties:
Tucker Carlson points out that while they’re attempting to get Rudy Giuliani on a failure-to-file-FARA-disclosures rap — FARA requires people working as lobbyists or agents for foreigners to disclose this to the government, unless they’re Democrats — one person we know for a fact worked for the Ukrainians and the Chinese and never filed a FARA disclosure is Hunter Biden.
So they’re framing a man who exposed Hunter Biden on a FARA rap, while protecting Hunter Biden himself from a FARA rap.
Also:
It’s troubling that, in late 2019, during the impeachment of President Trump, the Southern District of New York executed a “covert warrant” on @RudyGiuliani’s iCloud account. So they secretly had access to privileged private communications between the president and his lawyer
— Miranda Devine (@mirandadevine) April 30, 2021
“Troubling” indeed, but not the least surprising. In the replies to that tweet, there are many that say in effect, “Well, a judge had to approve it, so they must have had valid suspicions.” Apparently, nothing has been learned from the Russiagate FISA applications – or the people tweeting those remarks are ignorant of what happened with the FISA applications in Russiagate, or they are pretending ignorance because it serves their political purposes.
As for Giuliani himself, here’s what he says:
“I never, ever represented a foreign national,” Giuliani, a former federal prosecutor and New York City mayor, told Fox News host Tucker Carlson. “In fact, I have in my contracts, a refusal to do it because from the time I got out of being mayor, I did not want to lobby.”
He said his contracts contain a clause that indicates he will not participate in lobbying or foreign representation, something that he said would be “too compromising.”…
Giuliani told Carlson on Thursday that he has offered to cooperate with law enforcement for the past two years. He called the warrant “illegal” and “unconstitutional,” adding that a warrant could be issued only if there were evidence he was planning to destroy the materials.
Ah, but rules are just for when Republicans are doing the investigating and Democrats are being investigated.
{NOTE: Just to clarify regarding the title of this post, I’m well aware that this war on the right doesn’t originate with the FBI. But they are part of it and the agency appears to be more than willing to carry out the goals of the higher-ups.]
Mayday! Mayday!
[NOTE: This is a repeat of a previous post.]
Today is Mayday.
As a child I was confused by the wildly differing associations the word conjures up. It’s a distress signal, for example, apparently derived from the French for “come to my aid.”
That was the first meaning of the word I ever learned, from watching the World War II movies that were so ubiquitous on TV when I was a tiny child. The pilot would yell it into the radio as the fiery plane spiraled down after being hit, or as the stalling engine coughed and sputtered. On the ship the guy in uniform would tap it out in code and repeat it (always three times in a row, as is the convention) when the torpedo hit and the ship filled with water.
But on a far more personal level, it was the time of the May Féte (boy, does that sound archaic) in my elementary school, when each class had to learn a dance and perform it in the gymnasium in front of the entire student body’s proud/bored parents. The afternoon was capped by the eighth-graders, who were assigned the only activity of the day that seemed like fun—weaving multicolored ribbons around the maypole.
Ah, the maypole. As children, who knew it was a phallic symbol? Or that maypoles were once considered so risque that they were banned in parts of England by certain Protestant groups bent on discouraging the mixed-gender dancing and drunkenness that seemed to go along with them (not in my elementary school, however; only girls were allowed to wind the maypole ribbons, and the mixed-gender dancing the rest of us had to do was decidedly devoid of frivolity)?
The other meaning of Mayday was/is the Communist festival of labor, or International Workers Day. In my youth the big bad Soviets used to have huge parades that featured their frightening weaponry. Back in the 20s and 30s the Mayday parades in New York City were fairly large. I know this because I own a curious artifact of those times—a home movie of a Mayday parade from the mid-1920s. I’m not sure who in my family had such an early and prescient interest in movies, but the film features my paternal grandparents on their way to such a celebration.
They’d come to this country from pre-revolutionary Russia in the early years of the century. Like many such immigrants, my grandfather became a Soviet supporter who thought the Communists had a chance of making things better than they’d been in the Russia he’d left behind. Since he died rather young, only a few years after the film was made in the 1920s, I don’t know whether time and further revelations of the mess the Soviet Union became would have changed his point of view. In the film, however, the family goes to view the Manhattan Mayday parade, which looks to be a very well-attended event with hopeful Communist banners held high and nary a maypole nor a Morris dancer in sight.
The footage of the parade seemed archaic even back when I saw it as a young girl, although it was fascinating to see the grandfather and grandmother I’d never known (not to mention my father as a handsome seventeen-year old). But the most puzzling sight of all was the attention paid to the Woolworth building. Whoever took the movie was fascinated by it; there were two slow pans up and down its length.
Why the Woolworth Building? Opened in 1913, it was a cool fifty-seven stories high, the tallest building in the world until 1930. It had an elaborate Gothic facade and was considered a monument to capitalism—the “Cathedral of Commerce,” although the Communist-sympathizing photographer of my Mayday movie didn’t seem to let those two offending words (cathedral, commerce) get in the way of his awe for the building.
I never noticed the Woolworth building myself until the day I visited the site of the World Trade Center a few months after 9/11. There were still huge crowds coming to pay homage, and so we had to wait in a long line that snaked around the nearby blocks.
That’s how I found myself in front of a familiar sight, the Woolworth Building, still Gothic after all these years, and still standing (although it had lost electricity and telephone service for a few weeks after 9/11, the building itself sustained no damage). No longer dwarfed by the enormous towers of its successor—that new Cathedral of Commerce, the World Trade Center—the Woolworth Building even commanded a bit of its former dominance.
Although it’s still dwarfed from this angle:
And to bring this hodgepodge of a post round full circle, there exists a book of photos of 9/11 with the title Mayday, Mayday, Mayday!: The Day the Towers Fell, a reference to the myriad distress calls phoned in by firefighters on that terrible day.
Open thread 5/1/21
Steve Goodman was certainly ahead of his time. This song was written in 1979, over 40 years ago, and describes the pre-Disneyfied Times Square that I remember. It was a rough place.
This song would probably get him into big trouble these days:
Biden restricting travel from India
But it’s okay when Democrats do it, right?
The job of police
This comment from “boatbuilder” is brief and spot-on:
We ask men to take on the harsh and dangerous business of policing criminals, and demand that nothing unpleasant happens.
We don’t want anything unpleasant to happen at their hands, that is. The person with whom they’re interacting, innocent or guilty, criminal or not, is given a lot more leeway to perform the unpleasantries.
Perfection is demanded of cops, and of course there will be many exceptions and even a relatively small number of cruel and unjustified acts that constitute crimes. Each exception will be fully exploited by the left, but only if it involves a white officer and a black arrestee, which is by no means the only time such things happen.
And not only that – if the officer’s act is not bad enough, it will be lied about to make it seem even worse. And the punishment will be Draconian, as we’ve seen with Chauvin. Although he hasn’t been sentenced yet, I’m referring to the overcharging and then the guilty verdicts despite the near lack of evidence for the most egregious crimes with which he was charged, and the relatively poor evidence for even the least serious one.
The goal, as we’ve said before, probably is to undermine police departments so greatly that cops will either resign or back off from arresting people or both, crime will increase, and the populace will end up clamoring for a federal solution of some sort. The goal is always to increase leftist federal control.
The only black lives that matter to those in charge of BLM are their own, and those few who die at the hands or in the custody of white people (mostly police officers). The black lives that will be snuffed out as a result of lack of policing are just collateral damage in the worthy cause of ever-advancing leftist federal control as well as societal collapse leading up to it.
White liberals (not leftists; liberals) are mostly unaware of this strategy and are playing a virtue-signaling game with their support of BLM and other leftist groups with the same agenda. The press is probably composed of some liberals of that mindset, but also many dedicated leftists who are well aware of what’s going on and are fully compliant with it and eagerly enabling it. Any black person who is against this movement is labeled Uncle Tom or worse, and looked on as a racial traitor.
This is an echo of trends back in the 1960s that culminated in a great many murders of police officers by various black liberation groups. One difference is that back then there really was quite a bit of actual racism of the overt kind throughout society. The second difference between then and now is that these violent movements of the past had a lot less general support compared to now. But fifty years of indoctrination in leftist ideology has transformed our society fundamentally, so that more people are in favor of their radical aims, and social media is another aid to the spread of such beliefs. The leftist radicals of the 60s could only dream of such a tool.
It is no surprise that police officers have been leaving in droves in cities such as Seattle. Why would anyone want to be a police officer these days?
Biden the moderate healer says something-or-other about detention centers and ICE
First let me say that nothing that comes out of Biden’s mouth would surprise me. And let me also say that I see no reason to believe everything or anything that comes out of his mouth.
But one thing I do believe is that he will do the left’s bidding. And another is that, although he has some cognitive challenges, he is generally aware enough to know what he’s doing, at least when he does it.
Even in his prime, Biden was never known for brains, veracity, or principle. He’s been a politician for virtually his entire lengthy life, and he has always done what he thought was best for Biden. Now he seems to think that being far left is what’s best for Biden, and he will say and do what’s necessary – and/or what he’s told to say and do – without a pang of conscience. That’s the man he’s been his whole life, and whether he is in charge of himself right now or whether others are steering him, it doesn’t really matter much because the result is the same.
But that’s all just an introduction to this recent pearl that dropped from Biden’s lips:
Two men unfurled an orange banner near Biden’s stage in Duluth, Ga.
“End detention now! End detention now!” one man bellowed.
Biden at first joked, “We’ll give you a microphone.”
“Communities, not prisons!” the chant became, before evolving to “Abolish ICE! Abolish ICE!”
Another person shouted, “End private detention centers now — please!”
Biden told them, “I agree with you, I’m working on it, man. Give me another five days.” He later clarified to reporters he was “teasing them” about that.
You can interpret this any way you want. Is he working on abolishing private detention centers, which would mean that more and more illegal aliens would get released into the community, since we lack enough facilities? Is he working on abolishing ICE? Was he making a completely unfunny joke of some sort? Does he just say whatever strikes him at the moment? Does he care? Does he remember?
Where has all the flu gone?
First, the statistics:
Since the novel coronavirus began its global spread, influenza cases reported to the World Health Organization have dropped to minuscule levels. The reason, epidemiologists think, is that the public health measures taken to keep the coronavirus from spreading also stop the flu. Influenza viruses are transmitted in much the same way as SARS-CoV-2, but they are less effective at jumping from host to host.
That sounds logical – for about a second, until you think about it. If flu has fallen to almost zero for that reason, then why hasn’t COVID? Is flu that much more amendable to masks, distancing, and the like? And is that a known fact, or just a theory that is used to explain the huge difference in incidence this year?
“There’s just no flu circulating,” says Greg Poland, who has studied the disease at the Mayo Clinic for decades. The U.S. saw about 600 deaths from influenza during the 2020-2021 flu season. In comparison, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated there were roughly 22,000 deaths in the prior season and 34,000 two seasons ago.
There are lots of charts and graphs at the link. But the gist of it is that there doesn’t seem to be much if any flu anywhere.
So, what’s really going on? A lot of people think it’s that flu cases are occurring but are misdiagnosed as COVID. That would be possible except for one thing – some of these statistics are based on actual test of actual people, and such tests would reveal the difference between the two bugs. So I believe that, although that might explain some of it, there is something else that’s real going on here. .
There have been attempts to explain it, but they are at best guesses. One is that flu is more easily stopped by the measures that have been put in place for COVID, and although we don’t know that’s true it’s certainly possible. I’ve wondered for a while whether stopping flu – and the deaths it ordinarily causes – will be the next justification for universal and indefinitely-prolonged mask-wearing, distancing, and banning large functions except for left-wing demonstrations.
That article I just linked also says that children may be the main vector for spreading flu, and children haven’t been in school. Or have they? For example, France opened schools in May/June of 2020, and I recall that this sort of thing was true in much of Europe. I tried to find charts specific to Europe and/or to France that track influenza for 2020, and I’ve come up with nothing so far (if you can find some, please post the link), but my guess is that even after school began there were few cases.
Another possibility is that people who would ordinarily be especially susceptible to severe cases of flu – or deaths from it – were coming down with severe cases of COVID instead, and sometimes dying of it. Therefore COVID was culling the flu population. We really don’t know the incidence of mild cases of flu because they’re not ordinarily tested for flu, anyway.
Anyone have any other ideas?
Open thread 4/30/21
Senator Tim Scott must have made a good speech last night because afterwards “Uncle Tim” was trending on Twitter
I didn’t watch Tim Scott’s rebuttal speech last night either. However, it resulted in the unleashing of the usual leftist racist accusations against any black person on the right:
Twitter, known for censoring “wrong” opinions and attempting to serve as an arbiter of truth and facts, allowed the racist term “Uncle Tim” to trend in response to Sen. Tim Scott’s speech.
Scott blasted Biden for failing on his promise to reach across the aisle and criticized the use of race as a political weapon, saying, “Race is not a political weapon to settle every issue the way one side wants. It’s too important.”
That this racist term trended during Sen. Tim Scott's speech is as revealing as it is repugnant, as is the large-scale liberal silence that Twitter promoted a racist attack.
A world in which people of color are forced by racist insults to subscribe to one ideology is grotesque. pic.twitter.com/NDksUEriHn
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 29, 2021
Scott also said that America is not a racist country. You can imagine how that sat with the left.
Here’s a Twitter exchange from 2017 featuring Scott, that has since been deleted:
U.S. Sen. Tim Scott, the only black Republican senator, shut down a racist tweet Wednesday with a pithy one-word response.
The tweet, which has since been deleted from a Twitter account that has also disappeared from the Internet, called Scott a “house n—-a.”
“Senate,” Scott, the Republican senator from South Carolina, tweeted back.
By the way, whereas Scott is the “only black Republican senator,” the Democrats have a grand total of two.
The left has been working hard to destroy DeSantis, and at least for a while they will do it to Scott. And any other Republican who gains prominence and who seems to offer something that would attract a significant quantity of voters must also be attacked, the sooner the better.
Biden’s speech last night
No I didn’t watch it. Others did, though, such as Roger Kimball:
If you look at the Biden press pool — also known as CNN — the Biden administration is responsible for America’s robust response to this latest respiratory virus. But in fact, it was Donald Trump’s ‘Operation Warp Speed’ that produced several effective vaccines in record time — and it was Trump’s plan that provided the entire plan for distributing it.
Joe then went on to describe what he called, without cracking a smile, the ‘American Rescue Plan’. In essence, it is the same plan that was outlined, but in more modest terms, by a certain Italian politician in the 1920s. ‘All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.’…
it was all Bernie Sanders-esque class warfare: raise taxes, eat the rich, take control of — well, everything.
But along the way there were some strange echoes. Biden said his mantra was ‘Buy American’. ‘American tax dollars are going to be used to buy American products made in America that create American jobs.’ Where have we heard that before?…
Biden is here to bring us MAPA: ‘Make America Poor Again.’
Here’s how we do it. First, spend more money than anyone thought possible. Promise free stuff for everyone (except Republicans). Second, destroy the engines of prosperity. Start with the energy industry. Tax it, regulate, mount a huge ‘green- new-deal PR campaign against cheap, abundant energy. It’s working! Hundreds of thousands are out of work and gas prices are up some nine percent in just 100 days! Good going, Joe!
I think my favorite part of this dog’s breakfast was the part where he asked, how are we going to pay for all this. ‘I’ve made clear that we can do it without increasing deficits.’
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Who knew that Joe Biden, like Hamlet, had an antic disposition.
The deficit is already skyrocketing. But Joe is going after the ‘millionaires and billionaires who cheat on their taxes’. Did you know that the top one percent of earners already pay more than 40 percent of all income taxes? Think about that. The top 10 percent pay more than 71 percent, while the top 25 percent pay nearly 90 percent of all income taxes. So what is Joe talking about?
And then Biden went on about how terrible the January 6th insurrection was, how it almost brought down the country.
All predictable stuff from the Great Uniter.
More from Kimball:
I thought it was a horrible speech — cliché-ridden, yes, but also deeply mendacious. The latest import from China is not ‘one of the worst pandemics ever’. We were not ‘staring into an abyss of insurrection and autocracy’ on January 6.
But mendacity is Joe’s middle name – always has been. And the worst thing about all of this is how many people are perfectly okay with it.