by Bob Walsh
On February 28 an unarmed Chicago short-order cook, Ariel Roman, 33, committed the heinous offense of walking between subway cars on the train, which apparently is a death penalty offense in Illinois. The cops tried to deal with him off the train, while he was going to an escalator to exit the station. He was shot several times, including a few in the back. There is security and body cam footage.
Roman survived the shooting but was very seriously injured.
I wonder what they do in Chicago if you violate social distancing orders? Flamethrower?
Friday, May 1, 2020
OAKLAND PAYS OUT $1.4 MILLION FOR KILLING A MAN WITH A GUN
by Bob Walsh
This is one of those things where the actual facts are not much in dispute. In May of 2018 the cops rolled up on a guy passed out in a car holding a pistol in his lap.
The dead guy, Joshua Pawlik, was in the yard of a residence on 40th St. The cops rolled an armored vehicle up on him and yelled at him a lot. It seems that he finally woke up, poked his head up and may, or may not, have aimed his weapon at the cops. Four of them shot the shit out of him and another nailed him with a beanbag gun. There was body cam footage, which was unfortunately not unequivocal as to what happened.
Five of the cops involved in the incident were sacked. A Lt. on the scene was demoted. He was the incident commander. The fired cops are suing, alleging among other things violations of the Oakland city code in their firing.
This is one of those things where the actual facts are not much in dispute. In May of 2018 the cops rolled up on a guy passed out in a car holding a pistol in his lap.
The dead guy, Joshua Pawlik, was in the yard of a residence on 40th St. The cops rolled an armored vehicle up on him and yelled at him a lot. It seems that he finally woke up, poked his head up and may, or may not, have aimed his weapon at the cops. Four of them shot the shit out of him and another nailed him with a beanbag gun. There was body cam footage, which was unfortunately not unequivocal as to what happened.
Five of the cops involved in the incident were sacked. A Lt. on the scene was demoted. He was the incident commander. The fired cops are suing, alleging among other things violations of the Oakland city code in their firing.
WE ARE ELDERLY, HEAR US WHEEZE!
By Jim Higgins
Medium
April 30, 2020
So now we are going to corral the elderly at home and keep us away from public places? Apparently, we are the human hook and loop Velcro attracting Corvid-19 microbes.
I never warmed to the term “elderly.” It is too close to feeble and not far from infirm. It’s a euphemism for both.
Elderly is someone who places a box of Kleenex in every room.
Feeble is someone who can’t lift a tissue out of the box.
Infirm is someone who lives in a box.
I wear a button I bought at a production of Monty Python’s Spamalot. It reads: “I’m Not Dead Yet!” I wear it proudly as I maneuver the aisles with younger masked shoppers. No one will mistake me for elderly. Crazy, maybe.
When my wife was 62, a doctor’s letter releasing her to take a Zumba class identified her as “an elderly 62-year old.” She changed doctors. But she still Zumbas.
If 60 is the new 50 and 70 is the new 60 than elderly must be the new “old.”
Old has always been a familiar part of aging, more relative than offensive.
“How old are you?”
“I’m this many years old,” said my 3-year old self raising three fingers.
“She is only 20-years old.”
“ My dad is almost 80-years old.”
“My car is nearly 14-years old”
“This shirt is three weeks old”
I prefer old to elderly like I prefer Creamy to Crunchy, Improved to New, and Previously Owned to Used.
But now that we seasoned citizens are on the Corona hit list, we should expect some changes.
First, senior discounts will go the way of Friends Fly Free. Fewer patrons equal fewer coupons. Besides, the virus has already discounted us.
Second, early birds will become as extinct as dodo birds because no one will want to eat six feet away from a human petri dish.
Third, if grocery stores won’t allow us in then we will have to revert to our teen years of enlisting a passerby to purchase contraband:
“Pssst, hey kid. Here’s a 20. Go inside and buy me a box of Fiber One, some Metamucil and a package of Depends. Keep the change.”
To be fair, some stores are allowing us to shop early since most of us have already been up half the night peeing. We just need to be out of the store before the hoarders arrive.
Still, there are a few advantages that age affords us. Younger people hold doors for us, wealth management firms will always buy us lunch and Nigerian princes will offer to share their wealth. Yes, someday my prince will come through. But first I need to send money to a person in another town who says my grandson is in trouble that only a gift card will resolve.
I have been called many things in my 74 years but stupid is not one of them.
I just can’t remember them.
Medium
April 30, 2020
So now we are going to corral the elderly at home and keep us away from public places? Apparently, we are the human hook and loop Velcro attracting Corvid-19 microbes.
I never warmed to the term “elderly.” It is too close to feeble and not far from infirm. It’s a euphemism for both.
Elderly is someone who places a box of Kleenex in every room.
Feeble is someone who can’t lift a tissue out of the box.
Infirm is someone who lives in a box.
I wear a button I bought at a production of Monty Python’s Spamalot. It reads: “I’m Not Dead Yet!” I wear it proudly as I maneuver the aisles with younger masked shoppers. No one will mistake me for elderly. Crazy, maybe.
When my wife was 62, a doctor’s letter releasing her to take a Zumba class identified her as “an elderly 62-year old.” She changed doctors. But she still Zumbas.
If 60 is the new 50 and 70 is the new 60 than elderly must be the new “old.”
Old has always been a familiar part of aging, more relative than offensive.
“How old are you?”
“I’m this many years old,” said my 3-year old self raising three fingers.
“She is only 20-years old.”
“ My dad is almost 80-years old.”
“My car is nearly 14-years old”
“This shirt is three weeks old”
I prefer old to elderly like I prefer Creamy to Crunchy, Improved to New, and Previously Owned to Used.
But now that we seasoned citizens are on the Corona hit list, we should expect some changes.
First, senior discounts will go the way of Friends Fly Free. Fewer patrons equal fewer coupons. Besides, the virus has already discounted us.
Second, early birds will become as extinct as dodo birds because no one will want to eat six feet away from a human petri dish.
Third, if grocery stores won’t allow us in then we will have to revert to our teen years of enlisting a passerby to purchase contraband:
“Pssst, hey kid. Here’s a 20. Go inside and buy me a box of Fiber One, some Metamucil and a package of Depends. Keep the change.”
To be fair, some stores are allowing us to shop early since most of us have already been up half the night peeing. We just need to be out of the store before the hoarders arrive.
Still, there are a few advantages that age affords us. Younger people hold doors for us, wealth management firms will always buy us lunch and Nigerian princes will offer to share their wealth. Yes, someday my prince will come through. But first I need to send money to a person in another town who says my grandson is in trouble that only a gift card will resolve.
I have been called many things in my 74 years but stupid is not one of them.
I just can’t remember them.
WHEN YOU'RE HIGH, ACCIDENTS CAN HAPPEN
Deputies: Man accidentally deposits 2 bags of cocaine along with cash at Colorado bank
By Sarah Baines
9NEWS
April 28, 2020
JEFFERSON COUNTY, Colorado — People can trust banks to keep their money safe, but as for their drugs? Not so much.
Case in point: an incident in Jefferson County where deputies said 34-year-old David Pangallo allegedly deposited two bags of cocaine along with his cash at a bank on the 8300 block of Continental Divide Road on Friday.
According to a Facebook post from the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office, a bank teller discovered the drugs when he opened a tube the customer sent in the drive-thru.
“After further investigation it turns out the customer didn’t mean to deposit his cocaine,” the Facebook post says. “Imagine that.”
The teller called police, and deputies said they found more drugs in Pangallo’s car, the Facebook post says.
He was taken into custody but has since been released. It’s unclear what charges he will face for the incident.
By Sarah Baines
9NEWS
April 28, 2020
JEFFERSON COUNTY, Colorado — People can trust banks to keep their money safe, but as for their drugs? Not so much.
Case in point: an incident in Jefferson County where deputies said 34-year-old David Pangallo allegedly deposited two bags of cocaine along with his cash at a bank on the 8300 block of Continental Divide Road on Friday.
According to a Facebook post from the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office, a bank teller discovered the drugs when he opened a tube the customer sent in the drive-thru.
“After further investigation it turns out the customer didn’t mean to deposit his cocaine,” the Facebook post says. “Imagine that.”
The teller called police, and deputies said they found more drugs in Pangallo’s car, the Facebook post says.
He was taken into custody but has since been released. It’s unclear what charges he will face for the incident.
COPS GO INTO THE MORE PROFITABLE DRUG BUSINESS
Gulf Cartel kingpin 'El Puma' and the case that helped shape future U.S. drug investigations
By MX
Borderland Beat
April 29, 2020
Exactly twelve years ago today, on 29 April 2008, high-ranking Gulf Cartel member and former Tamaulipas State Police commander Carlos Landin Martinez ("El Puma") was sentenced to life imprisonment in the U.S. for his involvement in drug trafficking and money laundering. Though not widely known, El Puma's case was critical for future U.S. drug investigations and helped shaped the methodologies used today.
Authorities explained that they built the case against El Puma from the bottom-up, using the information from low-level criminals arrested in the U.S. and Mexico, which slowly led them to information about the cartel's leadership structure. Witnesses in El Puma's trial described the Gulf Cartel as a complex organization where low-level members were not allowed to participate in the criminal group's core operations, thus helping reduce the liability of the cartel leaders and their direct involvement in drug trafficking.
El Puma reduced his liability by taxing smugglers who operated in his turf and avoiding his direct employees from moving drugs for the cartel. In the Mexican criminal underworld, this fee or taxation is known as piso. Investigators built a new methodology to crack him down. It would later became the foundation for future organized crime investigations. In this report, Borderland Beat will cover El Puma's career and how the investigation and trial unfolded.
Early life
Carlos Landín Martínez was born in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, Mexico, in 1955/1956. He was a member of the Tamaulipas State Police, where he worked as the commander of the homicide investigatory task-force. His efforts in the agency were lauded in law enforcement circles both in Mexico and in the U.S. In the police, he was known as "El Puma Uno" (English: Puma One) for his aggressive stance against the most-wanted criminals in Tamaulipas.
But El Puma led a double life, authorities said. He officially worked to fight crime, but actively committed it on the side. He worked closely with the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas by running drug trafficking operations through the Reynosa corridor. El Puma was permanently released from the Tamaulipas State Police along with nine other police chiefs in 1999, but he continued in the cartel full-time.
Drug career
U.S. authorities tracked El Puma's drug trafficking activities back to 1998, when his criminal cells in Granjeno and Peñitas, Texas, worked with a family-led smuggling ring headed by Francisco Meza-Rojas, a former McAllen police officer. For nearly a deacde, El Puma's drug trafficking cells were responsible for moving narcotics from Mexico into the U.S.
Most of the drugs from the Gulf Cartel were cultivated in Michoacán, smuggled through Tamaulipas, and then redistributed in South Texas and throughout the rest of the U.S. The drugs were crossed via the Rio Grande River and dropped off in designated spots for other middlemen to pick up.
The drugs were then given to other smugglers, who met in parking lots of businesses in the McAllen area. Smugglers linked to El Puma would then take the drugs and store them in stash houses across the city. A group of smugglers would then take those drugs past the the U.S. Border Patrol stations in Falfurrias and Sarita, where they would then be distributed to cities like Dallas, Houston, Chicago, Tampa, Nashville, Atlanta, Greensboro, and New York City.
No. 2 of Reynosa
From January 2005 to January 2007, El Puma was the second-in-command for the Gulf Cartel in Reynosa. Among his duties included collecting taxes (or piso) from independent drug traffickers who wanted to smuggle drugs through his corridor, which extended between the Tamaulipas municipalities of Gustavo Díaz Ordaz and Río Bravo. Those who tried to circumvent this rule, or who were found responsible for losing drugs or money, were kidnapped, tortured, and/or killed on El Puma's orders.
During that time, the Reynosa corridor was officially headed by Gregorio Sauceda Gamboa ("Caramuela"), a kingpin that reported to Osiel Cárdenas Guillén, the top leader of the cartel. El Puma worked under both of them.
However, Sauceda Gamboa began having differences with the Gulf Cartel's leadership due to his perceived weakness; his excessive drinking, drug addiction, and cancer diagnosis pushed him to the sidelines. While Sauceda Gamboa's influence declined, El Puma began generating more influence and money.
Arrest
Then came El Puma's arrest. As he shopped for watermelons at an H-E-B supermarket in McAllen, Texas, an off-duty DEA agent caught a glance of him by coincidence. "He happened to fall into our lap, so we had to move fast," the agent said. "You only get one shot at a person like [El Puma]." And so he did. He called the police to stop him a few blocks away. El Puma was taken into custody.
A grandfather shopping for watermelons wouldn't get a second look. But El Puma was with two bodyguards at the supermarket. His faced looked familiar. The DEA had been investigating him for at least two years and knew he was living a double life: a quiet retiree who had retired from the Tamaulipas State Police and spent the weekends with his grandchildren, and the No. 2 for the Gulf Cartel in Reynosa.
Trial and sentence
During the seven-day trial, the jury reviewed the exhibits presented by the prosecution, which included drug seizure samples and hours of wiretapped conversations between Landín Martínez's smugglers in the Rio Grande Valley. More than a handful of criminals who worked under El Puma testified against him in court and identified him as the leader of the cartel in Reynosa.El Puma said he was innocent, while his defense team stated that the witnesses were testifying against their client in exchange for soother life sentences. None of them said they ever met El Puma in person or saw him committing a crime; they described how the Gulf Cartel was able to reduce liability by keeping low-level criminals away from the core operations of the cartel.
Interestingly, when asked if any of the witnesses had seen El Puma in person or committing a crime, all of them responded with a resounding "no". This was because none of them had any direct contact with him. El Puma's attorney argued that the witnesses' testimonies did not directly link him to the accusations. In the past, this would have probably been enough to help an alleged drug kingpin go free. But the prosecution argued that El Puma stirred the direction of his criminal activities through his subordinates on purpose to avoid capture.
El Puma was eventually found guilty off all counts and convicted to life imprisonment, though his sentence was later reduced. U.S. federal authorities stated that the case could serve as a model for future organized crime cases charging top crime bosses. Authorities explained that they built the case against El Puma from the bottom up, using the information from low-level criminals arrested in the U.S. and Mexico, which slowly led them to information about the cartel's leadership structure. This methodology had not been used before in U.S.-Mexico drug investigations.
El Puma's scheduled released date is on 19 June 2029. He is imprisoned at the Federal Medical Center, Butner, a North Carolina federal security prison for inmates with special health needs.
By MX
Borderland Beat
April 29, 2020
Exactly twelve years ago today, on 29 April 2008, high-ranking Gulf Cartel member and former Tamaulipas State Police commander Carlos Landin Martinez ("El Puma") was sentenced to life imprisonment in the U.S. for his involvement in drug trafficking and money laundering. Though not widely known, El Puma's case was critical for future U.S. drug investigations and helped shaped the methodologies used today.
Authorities explained that they built the case against El Puma from the bottom-up, using the information from low-level criminals arrested in the U.S. and Mexico, which slowly led them to information about the cartel's leadership structure. Witnesses in El Puma's trial described the Gulf Cartel as a complex organization where low-level members were not allowed to participate in the criminal group's core operations, thus helping reduce the liability of the cartel leaders and their direct involvement in drug trafficking.
El Puma reduced his liability by taxing smugglers who operated in his turf and avoiding his direct employees from moving drugs for the cartel. In the Mexican criminal underworld, this fee or taxation is known as piso. Investigators built a new methodology to crack him down. It would later became the foundation for future organized crime investigations. In this report, Borderland Beat will cover El Puma's career and how the investigation and trial unfolded.
Early life
Carlos Landín Martínez was born in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, Mexico, in 1955/1956. He was a member of the Tamaulipas State Police, where he worked as the commander of the homicide investigatory task-force. His efforts in the agency were lauded in law enforcement circles both in Mexico and in the U.S. In the police, he was known as "El Puma Uno" (English: Puma One) for his aggressive stance against the most-wanted criminals in Tamaulipas.
But El Puma led a double life, authorities said. He officially worked to fight crime, but actively committed it on the side. He worked closely with the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas by running drug trafficking operations through the Reynosa corridor. El Puma was permanently released from the Tamaulipas State Police along with nine other police chiefs in 1999, but he continued in the cartel full-time.
Drug career
U.S. authorities tracked El Puma's drug trafficking activities back to 1998, when his criminal cells in Granjeno and Peñitas, Texas, worked with a family-led smuggling ring headed by Francisco Meza-Rojas, a former McAllen police officer. For nearly a deacde, El Puma's drug trafficking cells were responsible for moving narcotics from Mexico into the U.S.
Most of the drugs from the Gulf Cartel were cultivated in Michoacán, smuggled through Tamaulipas, and then redistributed in South Texas and throughout the rest of the U.S. The drugs were crossed via the Rio Grande River and dropped off in designated spots for other middlemen to pick up.
The drugs were then given to other smugglers, who met in parking lots of businesses in the McAllen area. Smugglers linked to El Puma would then take the drugs and store them in stash houses across the city. A group of smugglers would then take those drugs past the the U.S. Border Patrol stations in Falfurrias and Sarita, where they would then be distributed to cities like Dallas, Houston, Chicago, Tampa, Nashville, Atlanta, Greensboro, and New York City.
No. 2 of Reynosa
From January 2005 to January 2007, El Puma was the second-in-command for the Gulf Cartel in Reynosa. Among his duties included collecting taxes (or piso) from independent drug traffickers who wanted to smuggle drugs through his corridor, which extended between the Tamaulipas municipalities of Gustavo Díaz Ordaz and Río Bravo. Those who tried to circumvent this rule, or who were found responsible for losing drugs or money, were kidnapped, tortured, and/or killed on El Puma's orders.
During that time, the Reynosa corridor was officially headed by Gregorio Sauceda Gamboa ("Caramuela"), a kingpin that reported to Osiel Cárdenas Guillén, the top leader of the cartel. El Puma worked under both of them.
However, Sauceda Gamboa began having differences with the Gulf Cartel's leadership due to his perceived weakness; his excessive drinking, drug addiction, and cancer diagnosis pushed him to the sidelines. While Sauceda Gamboa's influence declined, El Puma began generating more influence and money.
Arrest
Then came El Puma's arrest. As he shopped for watermelons at an H-E-B supermarket in McAllen, Texas, an off-duty DEA agent caught a glance of him by coincidence. "He happened to fall into our lap, so we had to move fast," the agent said. "You only get one shot at a person like [El Puma]." And so he did. He called the police to stop him a few blocks away. El Puma was taken into custody.
A grandfather shopping for watermelons wouldn't get a second look. But El Puma was with two bodyguards at the supermarket. His faced looked familiar. The DEA had been investigating him for at least two years and knew he was living a double life: a quiet retiree who had retired from the Tamaulipas State Police and spent the weekends with his grandchildren, and the No. 2 for the Gulf Cartel in Reynosa.
Trial and sentence
During the seven-day trial, the jury reviewed the exhibits presented by the prosecution, which included drug seizure samples and hours of wiretapped conversations between Landín Martínez's smugglers in the Rio Grande Valley. More than a handful of criminals who worked under El Puma testified against him in court and identified him as the leader of the cartel in Reynosa.El Puma said he was innocent, while his defense team stated that the witnesses were testifying against their client in exchange for soother life sentences. None of them said they ever met El Puma in person or saw him committing a crime; they described how the Gulf Cartel was able to reduce liability by keeping low-level criminals away from the core operations of the cartel.
Interestingly, when asked if any of the witnesses had seen El Puma in person or committing a crime, all of them responded with a resounding "no". This was because none of them had any direct contact with him. El Puma's attorney argued that the witnesses' testimonies did not directly link him to the accusations. In the past, this would have probably been enough to help an alleged drug kingpin go free. But the prosecution argued that El Puma stirred the direction of his criminal activities through his subordinates on purpose to avoid capture.
El Puma was eventually found guilty off all counts and convicted to life imprisonment, though his sentence was later reduced. U.S. federal authorities stated that the case could serve as a model for future organized crime cases charging top crime bosses. Authorities explained that they built the case against El Puma from the bottom up, using the information from low-level criminals arrested in the U.S. and Mexico, which slowly led them to information about the cartel's leadership structure. This methodology had not been used before in U.S.-Mexico drug investigations.
El Puma's scheduled released date is on 19 June 2029. He is imprisoned at the Federal Medical Center, Butner, a North Carolina federal security prison for inmates with special health needs.
OUR VIRUS IS A VIOLENT TEACHER
For a brief season in time, we glimpsed from the awful epidemic what was wheat and what was chaff, what was mahogany beneath and what a scrapped thin veneer above, who were the V8s and who the mere gaudy, tail fins—and how America ultimately got by and how it almost didn’t.
By Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
April 26, 2020
“War is a violent teacher.”—Thucydides
Before this virus has passed, those of the New York Symphony, like the defeated Redcoats at proverbial Yorktown, will be playing the real “The World Turned Upside Down”:
And then strange motions will abound.
Yet let’s be content, and the times lament,
you see the world turn’d upside down.
Before the virus, apparently we were prepping for our brave new progressive, centrally planned dystopia.
During the Barack Obama years, government agencies had begun to chart a new inclusive future for hoi polloi Americans. We were lectured frequently that the Obama arc of the moral universe was long, but it always bent toward his sense of justice. Translated that meant, like it or not, we Americans had a preordained moral rendezvous with a progressive destiny.
Suburban lifestyles, yards, grass, rural living, and commute driving were to be phased out. High rises, government run-buses, and high-speed rail were in: more people in less space, with less energy consumed, meant less trouble. Granny was better off in a green rest home, not the back bedroom.
Ohio was over; the EU was our future. Clean coal was a 20th-century embarrassment; the next and future Solyndra would be cutting-edge. The idea that the United States ought to be self-sufficient in energy and food seemed worthy of yawns.
Instead of the backyard barbeque and a lawn, apartment dwellers would enjoy shared green belts around their communal towers—albeit not as large as the Martha’s Vineyard estate of Barack Obama or the palazzo of Nancy Pelosi.
Universities were to speak truth to power in new race/class/gender missions and diversity/inclusion/equality agendas. The old boring curricula of math, science, engineering, literature, language, history, and Western Civ were sputtering out, or recalibrated to include social activist themes.
After all, China and India would supply the world’s next boring generation of rote engineers. But they could not invent, compute, or formulate without our brilliant peace studies and ethnic studies geniuses to give them moral instruction.
“Knowledge” became a relative construct, not an absolute that could be roughly calibrated. Students needed to appreciate that traditional curricula and grades were merely models of leveraging power by arbitrarily setting “standards”—pathologies that could only be understood by appreciating how the marginalized “Other” was victimized by them.
Being “woke” meant fathoming how unmet personal expectations ought always to be attributed to the fault of someone else—and, even worse, that “someone else” might be dead or alive. The Squad just told us so. Now Chairman Xi agrees.
Billions of dollars of university capital and budgets were diverted to new administration and faculty investments that might focus on how young people thought of themselves rather than what they actually knew. Everyone understood the job of vice provost for diversity, equity, and inclusion might easily disappear in a nanosecond and never be missed. No one dared to hint at the suggestion.
All were cynically aware that the vice president for diversity, equity, and inclusion made enough money to avoid living in a “diverse” neighborhood, put his own kids in a school where all were equally not poor, and wanted to be included among the elite.
There were new winners and losers in a transnational United States, and such university administrators were among the winners.
Globalization was to be seen as some sort of ultimate talent meter that finally told us not only who was talented but, more important, who was worthy. The dumb un-globalized losers could not figure out how to code, or lacked a communications major or international relations degree, or had not spent a semester abroad in China, or did not understand global investment. They clung to some ancient shibboleth—“Made in America”—as if producing stuff here really mattered.
So the deplorables and Lysol drinkers more or less deserved the hollowed-out manufacturing landscape, closed assembly plants, and industrial wasteland of the nation’s interior that anachronistically and foolishly had bet that muscular labor still had a place in the postmodern world.
Erasing Reality
Dummies! Fitness comes from the Peloton, not mastery of masonry or welding. Drones, artificial intelligence, and robots could easily crawl under the house and fix the drainpipe, or shimmy into the attic to wire a new kitchen. No more need for plumbers or electricians.
In the minds of the new citizens of the world, the ossified working classes, when they were not smelling up Walmart or hiding their missing teeth with corny smiles, were written off as a basket full of deplorables and irredeemables, or the dregs of the earth, or the clingers who always retreat to their guns and religion—the worst nightmare of Robert Mueller’s dream team and all-stars.
The more refined and bigger winners in the global crapshoot were unafraid to tell us that our fates really had been predetermined by “grey matter” (as in lots of theirs) that adjudicated who did “anybody-can-do-them” rote things like dropping seeds in the ground—or, in contrast, who excelled in capitalizing Chinese Communist companies.
The ancient principles of autarchy and autonomy—economic self-sufficiency and political independence—became passé. Borders, fair trade, and the U.S. Constitution paled in comparison to models like the Schengen Agreement, outsourcing and offshoring, and transnational organizations.
After all, who could ever imagine a time when you might need a constitutionally protected gun? Even if one could ever conceive of the unlikely act of letting prisoners out en masse, they were likely to return to productive lives, proving they never belonged in jail in the first place.
And we were assured by experts and science that the World Health Organization would warn us in plenty of time if a dangerous flu-like bug popped up 7,000 miles away.
Inventories were old and in the way. Just-in-time supply chains needed just enough Chinese products to arrive the day before they were sold out in stores. Who wished to pay for useless stuff stacked sitting on shelves for an excruciating 72 hours?
The idea that the United States might wish to be self-sufficient in pharmaceuticals, medical supplies, and rare earth minerals was written off as an update of Bonaparte’s failed continental system.
For the global Right, the market would adjudicate borders (when entry-level wages dropped below sustenance level, immigrants would wisely stay home).
For the Left the greater the number of the “Other” who arrived illegally, and the poorer they were, the more fodder they’d have for flipping those bad-people red states into good-people blue states.
If there ever was some sort of zombie apocalypse-like collapse, the survivors in New York would show the doomed yokels in Texas the consequences of being Texas and not New York.
No one was supposed to want his children to be a skilled plumber, a master electrician, an effective teacher, or a heroic nurse. Better it was instead to owe $100,000 in student loans to land an environmental studies degree, branded by a supposedly hard-to-get-into college. Even our Hollywood geniuses knew that—and were willing to go to prison to prove it.
Slick, shiny modern living magazines advertised the latest stone counters, metal refrigerators, and wood floors. Today’s in-brands and tastes became, in a blink, tomorrow’s proof of mundanity. Rarely did our elite wonder, much less care, from where the stone, the ores, and the timber came—much less who were the miners, the smelters, and the ax-men who harvested the stuff of their kitchens.
The Violent Teacher
Then the virus hit.
Panic ensued. Former madness was declared genius. More were needed in overalls, fewer in yoga pants. A Chevy van was preferable to a year’s pass on the metro. A first-class ticket to Milan was nothing but a trip to nowhere.
Roomy yards were again correct, nice elevators not so much. The bigger and more “mine” the car, the better to get away from “them” and “theirs” in the subway.
Driving wasn’t all that bad; flying apparently was. The quaint country cabin three hours from Manhattan was now a brilliant last redoubt. But living in Utah was even cooler than in Brooklyn Heights.
For some reason no one wished to vacation in Tuscany or see the Great Wall; all dreamed of an isolated lake at 7,000 feet in the Rockies, or the Sierras.
Vegas odds-makers, independent stock junkies, and the expert toilet-paper finder were deemed savvier than Ph.D. modelers from the Imperial College and the University of Washington. When the former’s numbers were screwed up, they at least paid in real-time and money, when the latter’s did, they sighed and screwed up again.
Toilet paper became bitcoins, hand sanitizer more valuable than Chanel.
Bankers were stuck in apartments trying to figure out a circuit breaker from a toilet baffle, and in Shakespearean fashion cried to spouses, “A handyman, a handyman, My kingdom for a handyman!”
For this moment at least, a ventilator producer, a bleach brewer, and a mask maker were our hoplites. The “I wouldn’t want to be him” slob with a big belly and big arms was abruptly needed to drive all night to get arugula and asparagus in Whole Foods by morning—and did.
Travel bans, the “wall,” and passport control were OK. Not so politically correct caravans of thousands of foreigners crashing through decrepit wire border fencing, nor those recently inaugurated direct flights from Wuhan. Take-out from MacDonald’s, grease and all, was wiser and safer than a choice reservation at Le Coucou.
Our best and brightest policymakers now said it would have been nice to trust China less, and Western Pennsylvania more. Just having Augmentin seemed wiser than did the chance of paying less for it.
Some 360,000 Chinese children, mostly of Communist elites, in American universities were no longer touted by universities as proof of their diversity, but shamelessly lamented as a vanishing herd no longer to be targeted and price-gouged.
Zoom, Skype, and online courses proved to be the little boy who looked at the parading gaudy professors and asked why they went naked? Was it all that bad to see just the professor’s videoed head without his strut?
There likely won’t be much of a “new normal.” Because when all the data is in, all the panic ended, the antivirals appearing, all the vaccinations working, the herd immunity growing, and the real lethality rate dropping, most of us, despite the tough barroom talk of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the dreams of governors Andrew Cuomo and Gavin Newsom, will go back to business as normal.
Yet we should hope not quite normal, either.
For a brief season in time, we glimpsed from the awful epidemic what was wheat and what was chaff, what was mahogany beneath and what a scrapped thin veneer above, who were the V8s and who the mere gaudy, tail fins—and how America ultimately got by and how it almost didn’t.
By Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
April 26, 2020
“War is a violent teacher.”—Thucydides
Before this virus has passed, those of the New York Symphony, like the defeated Redcoats at proverbial Yorktown, will be playing the real “The World Turned Upside Down”:
And then strange motions will abound.
Yet let’s be content, and the times lament,
you see the world turn’d upside down.
Before the virus, apparently we were prepping for our brave new progressive, centrally planned dystopia.
During the Barack Obama years, government agencies had begun to chart a new inclusive future for hoi polloi Americans. We were lectured frequently that the Obama arc of the moral universe was long, but it always bent toward his sense of justice. Translated that meant, like it or not, we Americans had a preordained moral rendezvous with a progressive destiny.
Suburban lifestyles, yards, grass, rural living, and commute driving were to be phased out. High rises, government run-buses, and high-speed rail were in: more people in less space, with less energy consumed, meant less trouble. Granny was better off in a green rest home, not the back bedroom.
Ohio was over; the EU was our future. Clean coal was a 20th-century embarrassment; the next and future Solyndra would be cutting-edge. The idea that the United States ought to be self-sufficient in energy and food seemed worthy of yawns.
Instead of the backyard barbeque and a lawn, apartment dwellers would enjoy shared green belts around their communal towers—albeit not as large as the Martha’s Vineyard estate of Barack Obama or the palazzo of Nancy Pelosi.
Universities were to speak truth to power in new race/class/gender missions and diversity/inclusion/equality agendas. The old boring curricula of math, science, engineering, literature, language, history, and Western Civ were sputtering out, or recalibrated to include social activist themes.
After all, China and India would supply the world’s next boring generation of rote engineers. But they could not invent, compute, or formulate without our brilliant peace studies and ethnic studies geniuses to give them moral instruction.
“Knowledge” became a relative construct, not an absolute that could be roughly calibrated. Students needed to appreciate that traditional curricula and grades were merely models of leveraging power by arbitrarily setting “standards”—pathologies that could only be understood by appreciating how the marginalized “Other” was victimized by them.
Being “woke” meant fathoming how unmet personal expectations ought always to be attributed to the fault of someone else—and, even worse, that “someone else” might be dead or alive. The Squad just told us so. Now Chairman Xi agrees.
Billions of dollars of university capital and budgets were diverted to new administration and faculty investments that might focus on how young people thought of themselves rather than what they actually knew. Everyone understood the job of vice provost for diversity, equity, and inclusion might easily disappear in a nanosecond and never be missed. No one dared to hint at the suggestion.
All were cynically aware that the vice president for diversity, equity, and inclusion made enough money to avoid living in a “diverse” neighborhood, put his own kids in a school where all were equally not poor, and wanted to be included among the elite.
There were new winners and losers in a transnational United States, and such university administrators were among the winners.
Globalization was to be seen as some sort of ultimate talent meter that finally told us not only who was talented but, more important, who was worthy. The dumb un-globalized losers could not figure out how to code, or lacked a communications major or international relations degree, or had not spent a semester abroad in China, or did not understand global investment. They clung to some ancient shibboleth—“Made in America”—as if producing stuff here really mattered.
So the deplorables and Lysol drinkers more or less deserved the hollowed-out manufacturing landscape, closed assembly plants, and industrial wasteland of the nation’s interior that anachronistically and foolishly had bet that muscular labor still had a place in the postmodern world.
Erasing Reality
Dummies! Fitness comes from the Peloton, not mastery of masonry or welding. Drones, artificial intelligence, and robots could easily crawl under the house and fix the drainpipe, or shimmy into the attic to wire a new kitchen. No more need for plumbers or electricians.
In the minds of the new citizens of the world, the ossified working classes, when they were not smelling up Walmart or hiding their missing teeth with corny smiles, were written off as a basket full of deplorables and irredeemables, or the dregs of the earth, or the clingers who always retreat to their guns and religion—the worst nightmare of Robert Mueller’s dream team and all-stars.
The more refined and bigger winners in the global crapshoot were unafraid to tell us that our fates really had been predetermined by “grey matter” (as in lots of theirs) that adjudicated who did “anybody-can-do-them” rote things like dropping seeds in the ground—or, in contrast, who excelled in capitalizing Chinese Communist companies.
The ancient principles of autarchy and autonomy—economic self-sufficiency and political independence—became passé. Borders, fair trade, and the U.S. Constitution paled in comparison to models like the Schengen Agreement, outsourcing and offshoring, and transnational organizations.
After all, who could ever imagine a time when you might need a constitutionally protected gun? Even if one could ever conceive of the unlikely act of letting prisoners out en masse, they were likely to return to productive lives, proving they never belonged in jail in the first place.
And we were assured by experts and science that the World Health Organization would warn us in plenty of time if a dangerous flu-like bug popped up 7,000 miles away.
Inventories were old and in the way. Just-in-time supply chains needed just enough Chinese products to arrive the day before they were sold out in stores. Who wished to pay for useless stuff stacked sitting on shelves for an excruciating 72 hours?
The idea that the United States might wish to be self-sufficient in pharmaceuticals, medical supplies, and rare earth minerals was written off as an update of Bonaparte’s failed continental system.
For the global Right, the market would adjudicate borders (when entry-level wages dropped below sustenance level, immigrants would wisely stay home).
For the Left the greater the number of the “Other” who arrived illegally, and the poorer they were, the more fodder they’d have for flipping those bad-people red states into good-people blue states.
If there ever was some sort of zombie apocalypse-like collapse, the survivors in New York would show the doomed yokels in Texas the consequences of being Texas and not New York.
No one was supposed to want his children to be a skilled plumber, a master electrician, an effective teacher, or a heroic nurse. Better it was instead to owe $100,000 in student loans to land an environmental studies degree, branded by a supposedly hard-to-get-into college. Even our Hollywood geniuses knew that—and were willing to go to prison to prove it.
Slick, shiny modern living magazines advertised the latest stone counters, metal refrigerators, and wood floors. Today’s in-brands and tastes became, in a blink, tomorrow’s proof of mundanity. Rarely did our elite wonder, much less care, from where the stone, the ores, and the timber came—much less who were the miners, the smelters, and the ax-men who harvested the stuff of their kitchens.
The Violent Teacher
Then the virus hit.
Panic ensued. Former madness was declared genius. More were needed in overalls, fewer in yoga pants. A Chevy van was preferable to a year’s pass on the metro. A first-class ticket to Milan was nothing but a trip to nowhere.
Roomy yards were again correct, nice elevators not so much. The bigger and more “mine” the car, the better to get away from “them” and “theirs” in the subway.
Driving wasn’t all that bad; flying apparently was. The quaint country cabin three hours from Manhattan was now a brilliant last redoubt. But living in Utah was even cooler than in Brooklyn Heights.
For some reason no one wished to vacation in Tuscany or see the Great Wall; all dreamed of an isolated lake at 7,000 feet in the Rockies, or the Sierras.
Vegas odds-makers, independent stock junkies, and the expert toilet-paper finder were deemed savvier than Ph.D. modelers from the Imperial College and the University of Washington. When the former’s numbers were screwed up, they at least paid in real-time and money, when the latter’s did, they sighed and screwed up again.
Toilet paper became bitcoins, hand sanitizer more valuable than Chanel.
Bankers were stuck in apartments trying to figure out a circuit breaker from a toilet baffle, and in Shakespearean fashion cried to spouses, “A handyman, a handyman, My kingdom for a handyman!”
For this moment at least, a ventilator producer, a bleach brewer, and a mask maker were our hoplites. The “I wouldn’t want to be him” slob with a big belly and big arms was abruptly needed to drive all night to get arugula and asparagus in Whole Foods by morning—and did.
Travel bans, the “wall,” and passport control were OK. Not so politically correct caravans of thousands of foreigners crashing through decrepit wire border fencing, nor those recently inaugurated direct flights from Wuhan. Take-out from MacDonald’s, grease and all, was wiser and safer than a choice reservation at Le Coucou.
Our best and brightest policymakers now said it would have been nice to trust China less, and Western Pennsylvania more. Just having Augmentin seemed wiser than did the chance of paying less for it.
Some 360,000 Chinese children, mostly of Communist elites, in American universities were no longer touted by universities as proof of their diversity, but shamelessly lamented as a vanishing herd no longer to be targeted and price-gouged.
Zoom, Skype, and online courses proved to be the little boy who looked at the parading gaudy professors and asked why they went naked? Was it all that bad to see just the professor’s videoed head without his strut?
There likely won’t be much of a “new normal.” Because when all the data is in, all the panic ended, the antivirals appearing, all the vaccinations working, the herd immunity growing, and the real lethality rate dropping, most of us, despite the tough barroom talk of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the dreams of governors Andrew Cuomo and Gavin Newsom, will go back to business as normal.
Yet we should hope not quite normal, either.
For a brief season in time, we glimpsed from the awful epidemic what was wheat and what was chaff, what was mahogany beneath and what a scrapped thin veneer above, who were the V8s and who the mere gaudy, tail fins—and how America ultimately got by and how it almost didn’t.
TRUMP WILL RECOGNIZE ISRAELI ANNEXATION OF WEST BANK, OFFICIALS SAY
State Department officials said Tuesday they will recognize Israel’s plans to annex major areas of the West Bank, under the condition that Israel pursues peace with the Palestinians under President Trump’s “Deal of the Century.”
By Ray Hanania
The Arab Daily News
April 28, 2020
President Trump will recognize Israel’s annexation of large areas of the West Bank as a part of a the Unity sharing government being formed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his political election rival Benny Gantz.
Under the Unity Government agreement, Israel will annex large areas of the West Bank, but only on the condition that the Trump administration supports annexation, Israeli officials have said.
Officials at the U.S. State Department told the Arab Daily News Tuesday that Trump will recognize Israel’s annexation of the major parts of the West Bank but it is contingent on Israeli officials making efforts to negotiate a peace agreement with the Palestinians.
“We continue to pursue the path that the President set out in January when presenting the U.S. Vision for Peace between Israel and the Palestinians,” an official at the State Department said Tuesday on condition of anonymity.
“Our position has not changed. As we have made consistently clear, we are prepared to recognize Israeli actions to extend Israeli sovereignty and the application of Israeli law to areas of the West Bank that the Vision foresees as being part of the State of Israel in the context of the Government of Israel agreeing to negotiate with the Palestinians along the lines set forth in President Trump’s Vision.”
Despite three corruption indictments and his long record of opposing peace with the Palestinians, Netanyahu and the Likud party failed to win enough seats to continue his nearly 12 year reign as Prime Minister in the last elections. Rather than seek a fourth election, Netanyahu agreed to form a Unity Government with Gantz, the Knesset Speaker and leader of Kahol Lavan.
In an agreement they reached last week, Netanyahu will serve as Prime Minister for 18 months and then turn over the office to Gantz. As a part of the agreement, Israel would also annex major areas of the West Bank by July 1, but only if the Trump Administration supports the move.
The State Department statement Tuesday gives Israel the green light to implement annexation.
“Our consultations in January with both Prime Minister Netanyahu and Knesset Speaker Gantz clearly demonstrated that we have a partner for peace in Israel,” the State Department spokesperson said, noting the Trump Administration continues to “consult closely with the Government of Israel” on annexation and peace.
The official emphasized that annexation would be in the context of the peace plan unveiled by Trump during a press conference at the White House on January 28, 2020. Trump said that the 80-page peace plan document was a “win-win” for Israelis and Palestinians.
Under the plan, according to Trump, Palestinians would “ double” the amount of land they now control. It would recognize Israeli sovereignty over major Jewish-only settlement blocs in the West Bank. Trump’s peace plan would give Palestinians a foothold in specific parts of East Jerusalem but keep the major holy, Christian, Muslim and Jewish, sites under Israeli government control.
Palestinian leaders have roundly rejected Trump’s peace plan and boycotted a preliminary meeting in Bahrain, the “Peace to Prosperity” conference last summer hosted by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner to provide hundreds of millions of dollars in economic support for a “Palestinian State.”
“The annexation would be in the context of an offer to the Palestinians to achieve statehood based upon specific terms, conditions, territorial dimensions and generous economic support. This is an unprecedented and highly beneficial opportunity for the Palestinians,” the spokesperson explained.
“The only realistic path forward to end this conflict is through negotiations aimed at achieving a comprehensive and lasting peace. We call on all members of the international community to put aside yesterday’s talking points and consider our plan thoughtfully. Now is the time for bold action, not tired slogans.”
By Ray Hanania
The Arab Daily News
April 28, 2020
President Trump will recognize Israel’s annexation of large areas of the West Bank as a part of a the Unity sharing government being formed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his political election rival Benny Gantz.
Under the Unity Government agreement, Israel will annex large areas of the West Bank, but only on the condition that the Trump administration supports annexation, Israeli officials have said.
Officials at the U.S. State Department told the Arab Daily News Tuesday that Trump will recognize Israel’s annexation of the major parts of the West Bank but it is contingent on Israeli officials making efforts to negotiate a peace agreement with the Palestinians.
“We continue to pursue the path that the President set out in January when presenting the U.S. Vision for Peace between Israel and the Palestinians,” an official at the State Department said Tuesday on condition of anonymity.
“Our position has not changed. As we have made consistently clear, we are prepared to recognize Israeli actions to extend Israeli sovereignty and the application of Israeli law to areas of the West Bank that the Vision foresees as being part of the State of Israel in the context of the Government of Israel agreeing to negotiate with the Palestinians along the lines set forth in President Trump’s Vision.”
Despite three corruption indictments and his long record of opposing peace with the Palestinians, Netanyahu and the Likud party failed to win enough seats to continue his nearly 12 year reign as Prime Minister in the last elections. Rather than seek a fourth election, Netanyahu agreed to form a Unity Government with Gantz, the Knesset Speaker and leader of Kahol Lavan.
In an agreement they reached last week, Netanyahu will serve as Prime Minister for 18 months and then turn over the office to Gantz. As a part of the agreement, Israel would also annex major areas of the West Bank by July 1, but only if the Trump Administration supports the move.
The State Department statement Tuesday gives Israel the green light to implement annexation.
“Our consultations in January with both Prime Minister Netanyahu and Knesset Speaker Gantz clearly demonstrated that we have a partner for peace in Israel,” the State Department spokesperson said, noting the Trump Administration continues to “consult closely with the Government of Israel” on annexation and peace.
The official emphasized that annexation would be in the context of the peace plan unveiled by Trump during a press conference at the White House on January 28, 2020. Trump said that the 80-page peace plan document was a “win-win” for Israelis and Palestinians.
Under the plan, according to Trump, Palestinians would “ double” the amount of land they now control. It would recognize Israeli sovereignty over major Jewish-only settlement blocs in the West Bank. Trump’s peace plan would give Palestinians a foothold in specific parts of East Jerusalem but keep the major holy, Christian, Muslim and Jewish, sites under Israeli government control.
Palestinian leaders have roundly rejected Trump’s peace plan and boycotted a preliminary meeting in Bahrain, the “Peace to Prosperity” conference last summer hosted by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner to provide hundreds of millions of dollars in economic support for a “Palestinian State.”
“The annexation would be in the context of an offer to the Palestinians to achieve statehood based upon specific terms, conditions, territorial dimensions and generous economic support. This is an unprecedented and highly beneficial opportunity for the Palestinians,” the spokesperson explained.
“The only realistic path forward to end this conflict is through negotiations aimed at achieving a comprehensive and lasting peace. We call on all members of the international community to put aside yesterday’s talking points and consider our plan thoughtfully. Now is the time for bold action, not tired slogans.”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)