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In First Weekend Of Riots, Looting Damage In 20 Major Cities Exceeded $400 Million By Jordan Davidson

Posted By on June 28th, 2020

https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/28/in-first-weekend-of-riots-looting-damag

Looting costs in America’s 20 largest metropolitan areas exceeded $400 million from the first weekend of rioting, according to a new report from the Anderson Economic Group.

“This includes property damage, lost inventory, cleanup and reconstruction costs, and closure-related lost wages,” the report stated. “[The study] did not assign any costs to peaceful protests or demonstrations.”

The report, published June 5, used “news publications to identify where looting occurred…and estimate the total costs of looting between May 29 and June 3.” The report authors say this value could be severely underestimated.

“Our estimates are based on observed patterns of looting in the 20 largest metropolitan areas across the country. We did not estimate costs in smaller metro areas that may have also experienced looting,” stated Brian Peterson, the firm’s director of public policy and economic analysis. “Furthermore, our estimates do not include costs to state or local governments that experienced property damage or incurred increased emergency service costs.”

According to an approximation given to Market Watch by Property Claim Services, damage incurred by riots in just Minnesota could total more than $25 million.

“We hope that those businesses that experienced looting and damage will be able to bounce back, but we know that some will not make it,” said Peterson. “That means empty storefronts and the loss of jobs at those businesses, which ultimately hurts local communities.”

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Is this the end of history? George Floyd was a pretext, not a cause. The cause was destruction of our civilization Roger Kimball

Posted By on June 28th, 2020

https://spectator.us/end-history-george-floyd-civilization/

Midway through Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, there occurs this exchange between two characters:‘“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually, then suddenly.”’

The process of civilizational bankruptcy takes a similar course. Casual, seemingly isolated attacks on the fabric of civilization feel at first like so many harmless insect bites. A speaker is shouted down. A statue is vandalized or removed. A college course once deemed essential is rebaptized as offensive: first it is pilloried, then it is canceled. People start quoting Tocqueville’s warning that in a democracy, as large inequalities dissolve, small inequalities are magnified, growing both rancid and rancorous. Political posturing is everywhere. At first it seems effete and merely silly; then it grows muscles and claws. The posturing now comes with bricks, baseball bats and Molotov cocktails. Grievances blur and lose their specificity. Every slight becomes a pretext for boundless rage. The ‘system’ — ordered liberty and the rule of law — is rudely shoved into the dustbin of history. Civility itself — the social compact that makes society possible — is tossed aside as an impediment to justice.

Is this the precipice upon which we now are perched? HBO has pulled the movie Gone With the Wind because the classic Civil War story is a ‘product of its time and depicts some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that have, unfortunately, been commonplace in American society’. And while you get your mind around that nugget of politically correct virtue signaling, note that Cops, a TV show that depicts the police in a positive light, is being summarily canceled ‘amid nationwide anti police protests after Mr Floyd’s killing’, according to the Wall Street Journal.

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Where are the deaths? The drum beat to halt the reopenings gets louder by the day. It should be resisted Heather Mac Donald

Posted By on June 28th, 2020

https://spectator.us/where-deaths-coronavirus-wave/

The coronavirus doomsayers could not even wait until the fall for the apocalyptic announcements of the dreaded second wave. Because the red states recklessly loosened their lockdowns, we are now told, the US is seeing a dangerous spike in coronavirus cases. ‘EXPERTS SKETCH GLOOMY PICTURE OF VIRUS SPREAD: FAUCI TELLS OF “DISTURBING” WAVE, WITH A VACCINE MONTHS AWAY,’ read the front-page lead headline in the New York Times on Wednesday. ‘VIRUS SPREAD AKIN TO “FOREST FIRE”’ read another front page headline in the Los Angeles Times on Monday, quoting Michael Osterholm, one of the media’s favorite public health experts. Osterholm had told NBC’s Meet the Press: ‘I’m actually of the mind right now — I think this is more like a forest fire. I don’t think that this is going to slow down.’

The ‘this’ is an uptick in daily new cases from 19,002 on June 9 to 38,386 on June 24. The high to date in new daily cases was on April 24 — 39,072. Since April 24, the daily case count started declining, then began rising again after around June 9. What virtually every fear-mongering story on America’s allegedly precarious situation leaves out, however, is the steadily dropping daily death numbers — from a high of 2,693 on April 21 to 808 on June 24. That April high was driven by New York City and its environs; those New York death numbers have declined, but they have not been replaced by deaths in the rest of the country. This should be good news. Instead, it is no news.

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Schiff: Bolton could have made a difference, but he chose to make a profit with his book Adam Schiff

Posted By on June 28th, 2020

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/06/28/john-bolton-trump-book-profit-over-patriotism-column/3256625001/

Rep. Adam  Schiff, D-Calif. District 28, is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.
Bolton provides new evidence that Trump flagrantly abused power and confirms our central impeachment charge that he put his interests above America’s.

Last week, we witnessed the reemergence of John Bolton, the president’s former national security adviser, and the release of his book. In it, Bolton describes his personal experiences with Donald Trump and his great alarm at Trump’s incompetence, his dangerous subordination of our national security to his own personal interests, and his fundamental indecency.

In short, Bolton is telling Americans what we already know. That the president is exactly what he appears to be: petty, self-serving, ignorant and utterly supplicant to autocrats in China, Turkey, North Korea and Russia.

We proved during the impeachment trial that Trump withheld hundreds of millions in military aid to Ukraine to coerce that country into announcing a sham investigation of his political rival. Bolton confirms our case and provides additional evidence of that flagrant abuse of power by providing a firsthand account of how Trump confirmed this illicit quid pro quo during a conversation they had. Moreover, Bolton also corroborates the testimony of Gordon Sondland, the former U.S. ambassador to the European Union who testified that “everyone was in the loop.” Indeed they were, including the secretary of State, the Defense secretary and Attorney General William Barr.

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Tom Gross Interviews Nidra Poller about her parents and her life….see note

Posted By on June 28th, 2020

Nidra is my dear friend- a fascinating woman and brilliant writer….rsk

* Nidra Poller (Paris) https://youtu.be/wHky3gPi0oA

Writer Nidra Poller discusses hanging out with James Baldwin and other African-American writers and musicians in 1970s Paris, the origins of the name Nidra, how her Japanese partner introduced her to Israel, and the position of women in the modern world.

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“More Statues, Not Fewer”-by Sydney Williams

Posted By on June 28th, 2020

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”

                                                                                                     George Orwell                                                                                                                

Statues and monuments are erected not just to honor an individual but as reminders we did not just appear, that we descend not just from our parents and grandparents but from a past and a culture that gave rise to the country in which we live. Despite nihilist messages from Black Lives Matter (BLM), we in America are fortunate. Most nations are not as free as this and none have seen so many “rags to riches” stories. Much of the world lives under totalitarian regimes, and the fact that global poverty has shrunk is (largely) due to the creative genius, entrepreneurial spirit and generosity of Americans. As Ayaan Hirsi Ali recently Tweeted, “America is the best place on the planet to be black, female, gay, trans or what have you.”   

Evolution is a slow process. Life, according to most scientists, began about four billion years ago, primates about a hundred million years ago and humanoids perhaps twenty million years ago. Over the millennia, evolution provided natural selection that allowed our ancestors to survive and gave us inherited traits that permitted us to develop as individuals. It took millions of years for man to live communally and even longer to reach the age of Enlightenment, when concepts of self-government, rule of law, equal justice and individual liberty emerged. Throughout most of history, man fought – generally over land or religion. Today, we are indebted, in terms of liberty, democracy and markets to men like Thomas Hobbes, Isaac Newton, Rene Descartes, Galileo, Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin, David Hume and Adam Smith. Their ideas, many based on the writings of ancient Greeks and Romans, developed in the 17th and 18th Centuries. The United States Constitution, when adopted in 1788, served as their laboratory. We are still being tested.

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The Rioters and the Rentiers – Post-industrial cities aren’t working Michael Lind

Posted By on June 28th, 2020

https://spectator.us/rioters-rentiers-democratic-city/

It was inevitable that the wave of destructive rioting and looting that has swept through cities that are almost all governed by progressive Democrats, triggered initially by outrage over the sickening death in police custody of George Floyd, would be compared to the American urban riots of earlier generations. But the parallels miss profound differences in the underlying economic and social dynamics.

The Detroit and Newark riots of 1967 and the Los Angeles riot of 1992, for example, took place in cities suffering from the effects of deindustrialization. Los Angeles is not often thought of as a major manufacturing center, but Southern California had a flourishing aerospace industry that went into decline following the Cold War. The children and grandchildren of prosperous industrial workers found themselves stranded in urban regions whose economies shriveled as manufacturing shut down or moved elsewhere.

The violent riots that have taken place in cities like New York are quite different. Most of the cities that are being trashed by opportunistic looters, leftist radicals and criminal gangs lost significant manufacturing long ago. Some of them, like Washington, DC, were never industrial centers. These post-industrial cities are centers of finance like New York, tech like San Francisco, or government like Washington, not centers of physical production, most of which in the 21st century takes place on cheap land on the outskirts of cities or in rural areas.

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North Portland Looks Like ‘War Zone’ After Antifa Allowed to Rampage For Hours By Debra Heine

Posted By on June 28th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/06/26/north-portland-looks-like-war-zone-after-antifa-allowed-to-rampage-for-hours/

Parts of Portland Oregon look like a “war zone” after a mob of about 200 antifa militants went on a destructive rampage late Thursday night into early Friday morning.

While the police stood by and watched, according to Portland-based journalist Andy Ngo, the antifa rioters tried to set up an “autonomous zone” outside the Portland Police North Precinct using barricades and stolen property.

“They’re occupying the space & trying to recreate another autonomous zone like the one they did outside Ted Wheeler’s condo,” he reported on Twitter. “A separate mob is demonstrating downtown.”

Throughout the early morning hours, the agitators started fires, smashed windows, looted and vandalized buildings. Militants also broke into a bank and also set fire to the Portland Police Bureau’s North Precinct, according to Oregon Live.

After the antifa militants fired mortars and paintballs at officers, resulting in multiple injuries, Portland police finally administered CS gas to disperse them, KATU News reporter Dan McCarthy reported. Only four people were arrested.

The radicals were allowed to do an extensive amount of property damage before they were shut down.

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A Coup Against Our Institutions The systematic campaign to undermine an incoming presidential administration through politicized investigations is a true constitutional crisis. By Roger Kimball *****

Posted By on June 28th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/06/27/a-coup-against-our-institutions/

Matthew Spalding, a scholar of the Constitution and dean of Hillsdale College’s Van Andel Graduate School of Government in Washington, D.C., has written an important essay on the troubling possibility that the treatment of General Michael Flynn by the Obama administration and, later, by holdovers in the FBI, the Justice Department, and the CIA, represents not just a personal disaster for Flynn—who was, for a week or so, President Trump’s national security advisor—but also a brewing constitutional crisis for the United States.

Many commentators, myself included, have described the whole “Donald-Trump-was-a-Russian-Asset” caper as the biggest political scandal in U.S. history. We were ridiculed or condemned by the Left and the NeverTrump fraternity alleged to be on the Right for saying that, but time has proven us right. We were right, too, that this scandal was less a “hoax,” as it was sometimes called, than an attempted, if slow-motion, coup. It was an attempted coup because it aimed to disrupt the peaceful transition of presidential power from one administration, and one party, to another.

That sounds pretty dramatic, I know—aren’t “coups” things that happen in South American banana republics, not the United States? But as I wrote in May 2019, “coup” 

accurately expresses the deliberate effort by actors in the Obama Administration, including by President Obama himself, to assure Hillary Clinton’s victory by destroying the reputation of Donald Trump. “Most Presidents leave office,” the commentator L. J. Keith recently wrote, “and essentially step back from public life. Not Barack Obama. Shellshocked by Hillary Clinton’s loss, Obama, Brennan, Clapper, Comey, and Clinton set in motion a series of events that will forever tar his presidency, and decimate the concept of a peaceful transition of power.”

I returned to Keith’s point last September, noting that “the Obama administration’s actions threatened not just Trump and his presidency, but the very processes and protocols by which the peaceful transition of power has been effected in the United States.”

This troubling truth is Spalding’s theme, and he brings together the threads of the argument in masterly fashion. 

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Me and ‘Mr. Jones’: A New Film Exposes one of the Oldest Deceits of the New York Times By Ed Driscoll

Posted By on June 28th, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/culture/ed-driscoll/2020/06/26/mr-jones-walter-duranty-n580824

Having linked at Instapundit to a couple of reviews of the new film about the journalist who first went on the record about the Soviet Union’s terror famine in Ukraine in 1933, titled Mr. Jones, I bit the bullet and purchased it from Amazon Prime Video. I wanted to like this film so, so much, given that it focuses on a subject that Hollywood moviemakers have avoided for decades. And while Mr. Jones has many excellent moments, it also has several scenes that ultimately work against it as a film.

But it’s a very noble failure. The man in the title is real-life Welsh journalist Gareth Jones (1905-1935), played by James Norton. But he’s really not what makes Mr. Jones so important a film. That person is the now infamous Walter Duranty, the New York Times’ man in Moscow, Stalin’s stenographer, played by Peter Sarsgaard. Previously, Sarsgaard co-starred in another film about a leftwing fabulist run amok, Shattered Glass, playing the editor of the New Republic’s Stephen Glass.

In 1932, Duranty won a Pulitzer for his lies that, as Lincoln Steffens wrote in 1919, the Soviet Union and its capital-C-Communism was “the future, and it worked.”

It didn’t. And the Times, which apparently now sees the Soviet Union as some sort of extended experiment in free love under Premier Austin Powers, has yet to return the Pulitzer.