Contact tracing was always going to be a hard slog in America.

The mobility of the people, along with the continental size of our nation (round-trip commutes of 100 miles are common) and the general bustle of the day with multiple stops for necessaries, planned or otherwise....yikes.

And that was before most of the health expert class decided to publicly-execute their credibility by supporting or fearfully-avoiding criticism of massive, crowded protests during the pandemic.

So, yeah--this is accurate (hat-tip to Don):

 

In an age where doxxing does not result in 20 year minimums, the third bolded point is certainly going to happen.

But before that, the "go piss up a rope" responses are going to be off-the-charts.

And in light of current events, there's going to be a shortage of law enforcement to deal with the recalcitrant.

Mayor Garcetti's promise to cut police funding has predictable effect.

A severed pig head on a spike was placed outside a Los Angeles police precinct.

And police officers are being doxxed all across the nation.

Rich people frequently live in a world without police: they have well-trained private security contractors (usually former LEOs, naturally) who patrol their gated communities.

The rest of us are going to have a different experience with the concept.

A nation of men, not laws, creeps ever-closer.

Normally, I'd be offended by this kind of statement.

The President of a New York detectives' association tells the membership to look out for themselves first and foremost.

However you want to spin it, it recommends something right next door to dereliction of duty. And a little recognition of the underlying grievances would not hurt, either.

But in an environment where cops are, in fact, being targeted, and politicians are following the crowds....diGiacomo is almost certainly just repeating what police officers all over the country are hearing from their loved ones and friends.

And I feel the same concern for my LEO brother right now.

Related Prediction: 2020 is going to be the new record year for gun sales.

And the second place year will be like "Twice a Prince" at the '73 Belmont Stakes: barely on the same track.

"As Good As It Gets" is one of my favorites.

Because the writing is brilliant and each of the main performers is up to the task. This is from one of the many scenes that have stuck with me.

Carol Connelly: We all have these terrible stories to get over, and you...

Melvin Udall: It's not true. Some of us have great stories, pretty stories that take place at lakes with boats and friends and noodle salad. Just no one in this car. But a lot of people, that's their story. Good times, noodle salad. What makes it so hard is not that you had it bad, but that you're that pissed that so many others had it good.

[pause]

Carol Connelly: No. I don't think so.

Simon Bishop: Not it at all, really.

Melvin Udall: "Not it at all," huh? OK.

"What are you reading?" you didn't ask.

So I'll tell you anyway:

Lots. 

I have taken a shine to the writings of Saint Bonaventure, the Seraphic Doctor of the Franciscans.

A contemporary of Saint Thomas Aquinas, he has dwelt in the shadow of the Angelic Doctor for centuries. 

I think this is largely for two reasons: 

(1) Saint Thomas is more accessible, especially in the Summa Theologiae. The premise-objection-reply format lends itself more rapidly to assimilation by the reader. Saint Bonaventure sometimes uses the same approach, but more frequently he does not. And while his prose is accessible (certainly compared to Bl. Duns Scotus), his writing is loaded with seemingly-simple terms which presume a grounding in scholastic language which Thomas' does not.

This is not the case with his mystical writing, which is more accessible. 

Nevertheless, Bonaventure rewards multiple readings. 

(2) The second reason he was overshadowed is that, in many ways, he is the more "conservative" of the two men, souring considerably on Aristotle near the end of his life. While Bonaventure did not entirely abandon Aristotleian reason, he was much more skeptical about it than Thomas, and saw it as largely corrosive.

For Bonaventure, revelation always came first, and revelation demonstrated the limits of human intellect. The goal of true philosophy is to find one's way back to God, and the Scriptures point the way. Reason itself points the way to theology.

 The Franciscans always kept his torch lit, and the completion of the "Quarrachi Edition" of his complete works in the late 19th Century helped re-ignite wider interest. And a certain emeritus pontiff was a huge fan of Bonaventure's works. Most of it is still not in print in English, but the Franciscan Institute has a solid list of his works available in English translation. Alas, they are not shipping at the moment, but should be up and running later.

The second item in heavy rotation is the Book of Sirach. Written during a time of turmoil for the Jewish people, the timeless wisdom is especially apt for our times. And the foreshadowing of certain of Christ's teachings is notable, which should not

surprise.

Isn't living through a cultural revolution fun?

I'm sure it will end well.

The last one did.

And it helped form Red China into the responsible, collegial member of the world community it is today.

What happened to George Floyd was an unmitigated horror. As an asthmatic, I recall the many times I was taken to the hospital because I could not breathe. The notion of someone choking off my breath with their knee hits hard. And the idea of the choker wearing a badge while doing so is worse. And the names can be multiplied: Eric Garner and Philando Castile are but two that leap to mind.

None of that should obscure the death and destruction that accompanied the protests, nor the fact that the demands have become expansive.

We have heard much about "being part of the problem" recently.

And there is a legitimate complaint there. More than legit: the "badges and incidents of slavery," to use language crafted by persons wiser than ourselves, are still in existence 155 years later. It could hardly be otherwise, less than three generations removed from the legislative and judicial bombs delivered against Jim Crow in the 1960s.

But the "part of the problem" language is one-sided, as can be expected in our times. It misses the grim reality that the causes of our problems are complex and have many sides. Not to mention that too many of the responses are destructive of the civil order needed for America to be more than an identity-riven Balkans with nukes.

The destruction of black lives and livelihoods over the past week goes far beyond the family and friends of George Floyd.

So, if you don't recognize any of the names in this column, let me humbly suggest that you, too, are part of the problem.

The Economic Tsunami is Still Far Out to Sea.

The effects of shutting down the American economic machine are going to be felt for a long time to come.

"There’s a lot of denial here, as there was in the 1930s,” said Eric Rauchway, a historian at the University of California, Davis, who has written extensively about the Great Depression. “At the beginning of the Depression, nobody wanted to admit that it was a crisis. The actions the government took were not adequate to the scope of the problem, yet they were very quick to say there had been a turnaround.”

Though it may not attract the attention that reopening beaches and a soaring stock market might, the evidence is everywhere if you look closely.

Consider those seemingly great new employment numbers. It is clear that many workers who were temporarily laid off in March and April returned to work in May, such as employees at once-closed restaurants that opened up, or construction workers who returned to job sites.

Continue reading the main story

But it still left the economy with 19.55 million fewer jobs than existed in February. And the rebound came in part thanks to more than $500 billion in federal aid to small businesses offered on the condition that workers be retained, under the Paycheck Protection Program.

Other data points to a severe but slower-moving crisis of collapsing demand that will affect many more corners of the economy than those that were forced to close because of the pandemic.

New orders for manufactured goods, for example, remained in starkly negative territory in May, according to the Institute for Supply Management; its index came in at 31.8, far below the level of 50 that is the line between expansion and contraction.

* * *

“Hotels are locked down, so people buy fewer cars because they don’t need to travel as much,” said Veronica Guerrieri, an economist at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. “Restaurants are locked down, so people don’t need fancy clothes because they don’t want to go out as much.”

The result is that what started as a disruption to the supply side of the economy has metastasized into a collapse of the demand side, she and co-authors say in a recent working paper. They call it a Keynesian supply shock: an inversion of the demand-driven crisis of the Great Depression described by the great economist of that era, John Maynard Keynes.

Continue reading the main story

“Demand is interrelated with supply,” said Iván Werning, an M.I.T. economist and a co-author of the paper. “It’s not a separate concept.”

The demand shock, with lagged effects, is only beginning to hurt major segments of the economy, like sellers of capital goods that are experiencing plunging sales; state and local governments that are seeing tax revenues crater; and landlords who are seeing rent payments dry up.

The deflationary crunch has yet to squeeze with full force, rises in food and gas prices over the last few weeks notwithstanding.

When it does, it is going to be grim. And a depression will take lots of lives, too.

The Memorial for the 54th Massachusetts Regiment was defaced during the protests.

That regiment was the all-black unit immortalized in the film Glory.

Men who had been born free fighting for the liberation of their enslaved brethren in the Confederacy.

So, makes perfect sense that the protests would vandalize that one.

Current mood: this.

Turns out it's a regular target of the Epsilons (yes, I'm really hacked off) who will eventually run the show.

"A thousand men signed up just after President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, just think about that," said Liz Vizza, executive director of Friends of the Public Garden. "These are men who, if they were captured in the south, would be enslaved or murdered. But this cause was so important to them, they signed up to go fight for their freedom."

The memorial has been vandalized before – with paint in 2012, and the sword was broken off in 2015 and 2017.

The Memorial is one of the great achievements of America's greatest sculptor, Augustus Saint-Gaudens. 

Wise people know its significance as a timeless tribute to the black American in arms--and to liberty itself.

But we seem to have hit "peak wisdom" some time back, and it continues to dwindle away by the hour.

"Must be Bald-Faced Liar": the essential job qualification for Catholic Archbishop of Washington.

We all knew that Wilton Gregory was moved to Washington to keep Donald Wuerl's and Ted McCarrick's remaining secrets and network of pals secure. After all, the overlap is considerable.

And while that involves a certain amount of smiling mendacity, I wasn't expecting him to display his predecessors' knack for easily-disproven lies.

At least not so soon.

Donald McClarey brings this to our attention today: the shocked, shocked! Archbishop had been fully aware of the President's planned visit to the JPII Center and had declined an invite:

The White House said Sunday that Washington’s archbishop was invited to attend an event with President Donald Trump several days before it took place, amid media reports that the archbishop did not learn of the event until the night before it took place.

White House deputy press secretary Judd Deere told CNA June 7 that “Archbishop Gregory received an invitation to the President’s event at the St. John Paul II Shrine the week prior to the President’s visit. He declined due to other commitments.”

Correspondence between Archbishop Wilton Gregory’s office and the White House indicates the same.

In correspondence dated May 30th and obtained by CNA, Gregory’s office declined “the kind invitation to attend the event celebrating International Religious Freedom on Tuesday, June 2, 2020 at the Saint John Paul II Shrine.“

I'm neither surprised nor disappointed. As the last few years have shown, this is the precisely the kind of shallow, hissing ideologue the pontiff wants in prominent positions in the American church. 

I can't wait to see who he gives us to run Detroit when that bleak day comes.

Interesting, but mostly as a sign of how times have changed.

According to this test here, I am a "theocratic distributist."

That's an ominous coinage for what boils down to "standard-issue Cold War Catholic Democrat."

It's too much "today's hot buttons" and takes no account of the events which shape a person's worldview as they age. To make it more useful, it should ask for the age of the test-taker and ask him about events and political issues that they witnessed during their lifetimes.

The inadvertent "chronological snobbery," along with the mushiness (and sometimes obvious bias) of the questions are also a bit problematic.

But it's still interesting and unintentionally revealing. Even if the latter is more about the world in 2020 than the person being quizzed.

And no, I have no idea what is going on with the fonts.

Flat-out bizarre why I can't manage any consistency on that, but there you go.

At least I'm not screaming in ALL CAPS?

Little victories.