The Zero Rs.

It is often said that federalism is a laboratory that allows States to try their own solutions to assorted domestic problems. 

If that's the case, the Beaver State is brewing up a bold concoction: 

Students no longer have to demonstrate proficiency in reading, writing and math to get a diploma.

Why?

Equity is a jealous god:

The governor’s deputy communications director said that dropping the requirements “will benefit Oregon’s Black, Latino, Latina, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, Pacific Islander, Tribal, and students of color.”

The hard bigotry of no expectations has returned.

Repeat after me: Marxists are not hypocrites.

Power is not a means; it is an end. 

One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. 

The object of persecution is persecution. 

The object of torture is torture. 

The object of power is power.

 

It is wrong to call Buy Large Mansions! leader Patrice Cullors a "fraud." 

I understand the compulsion, but the barest read of history demonstrates that Marxists are impervious to allegations of hypocrisy.  

Marxism is simply a method of power acquisition that drapes itself in the finery of social uplift for the masses. It sets forth principles--and then proceeds to ruthlessly dispense with them and those who hold them. 

It has done so from the beginning. All that matters is what the party decides. And when the party line changes, so do the party members. Or else. 

Marxism always reaches a "two legs better" equilibrium, with former revolutionaries living in the dachas of the murdered or exiled nobility. 

Sure, there are always true believers who get betrayed--and when they're lucky, they live to warn others of the true nature of the beast. 

But in the final analysis, Marxism always takes on the features of that which it claimed to oppose--but in reality, merely envied. 

From the historical record, I'd say that Ms. Cullors is actually a superb Marxist who knows how to follow the well-trodden path.

Woke backfires.

Burger King UK is groveling over its "Women belong in the kitchen" tweet.

It just reminds me that the dominant culture nowadays honors women who work in any kitchen but their own. Because the latter is oppressive or something.

My much better half recently picked up an Angela Davis (!) book from two generations ago and paged through it. 

In it, the celebrated Marxist author proposed that women be liberated from housework by instead having teams of workers handle such things. 

Who would be more likely to make up such teams, she wondered? Naturally, such workers would be honored in the new order. But the bottom line was that working in the home is laudable for women only if it's someone else's home.

And here we are.

Marxist central planning or protection of the environment.

You can't have both.

The Aral Sea.

Norilsk.

And now "Lake" Baotou.

The environment has historically fared badly in socialist republics.

China continues that pattern. And despite the fact the regime in Beijing is willing to turn "our common home" into a public toilet, normally-voluble voices on that topic will remain conspicuously silent.

Hollywood has always loved totalitarians.

First it was letting Nazis censor scripts in order to keep those sweet Deutsche Marks flowing.

Then it started a love affair with communism, which never really ended. 

Now, in an exemplary example of American efficiency, Hollywood has decided: why not both?

Xi's China has Hollywood on a choke chain, and the moguls are pantingly-happy to roll over.

Disney just dropped the live-action version of Mulan on its streaming channel.

And it's Sino-fasctastic!

The Chinese regime pre-cleared the script, and it was filmed in Xinjiang, the center of the Uighur ethnic cleansing operation. Oh, and Disney profusely thanks Communist Party agencies for their assistance in the credits.

After the film’s release last Friday, observers noted another controversial element: in the final credits Disney offers “special thanks” to eight government entities in Xinjiang, including the public security bureau in Turpan, a city in eastern Xinjiang where several re-education camps have been documented.

The film also expresses thanks to the “publicity department of CPC Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomy Region Committee”, the Chinese Communist party’s propaganda department in Xinjiang. Disney has been approached for comment.

China has faced international scrutiny over its treatment of Muslim minorities in Xinjiang, where it is estimated at least 1 million residents have been detained in extrajudicial internment camps. Uighur women have reported forced sterilisations and birth control as part of a government campaign to suppress birthrates, in what experts have described as “demographic genocide”.

According to media reports before its release, Mulan was shot in about 20 locations in China, including the Mingsha Shan desert, part of which is in Xinjiang, and the Tuyuk Valley, an oasis village east of Turpan.

Filming took place in 2018, the same year China’s “strike hard” campaign in Xinjiang ramped up with the construction of the camps. According to researcher Adrian Zenz, Turpan was the first documented case of “re-education” or political indoctrination used against Uighurs to “eradicate the soil for the breeding and spread of religious extremism”.

Activists calling for a boycott of the film are now highlighting its links to Xinjiang, while other researchers noted that the public security bureau in Turpan oversees at least 14 internment camps in the area.

Human rights advocates have called on Disney to be transparent about its dealings with authorities in Xinjiang. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, Disney shared its script with Chinese authorities and consulted with local advisers in order to guarantee a release in China.

Bonus: the lead actress loudly praises the Hong Kong police for their crackdown on protesters.

Remember this the next time some celebrity takes a Brave(TM) political stand on something that happened in the West. 

For the right amount of money, the movie industry would film a buddy comedy on a mass grave.

"Police accountability activists" have considerably broadened their platform and methods.

The historical phrase is direct action.

Demanding people give up their homes in the middle of the night and supporting looting as "reparations" are both in the wheelhouse of direct action.

If you are of a mind to shrug off the latter as just big guys getting a minor insurance headache, you (1) are part of the problem, and (2) incredibly wrong. 

And in five years when the locals are wondering why they are living in broadened food deserts and have to travel 30 miles into the (inexplicably extra-defensive, gimlet-eyed) suburbs, there won't be any wondering why.

In an interesting turn of events, African-American residents of the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago weren't having any part of a demonstration against their police precinct.

“Y’all don’t come out when the kids get shot. Y’all come out when it has something to do with the f—ing police,” Smith said. “We out here every day watching our kids get their brains blown out, with no budget, no resources. Y’all motherf—ers getting all the resources, and you want to come over here and disrupt our neighborhood.”

At least this demonstration wasn't showing signs of revolutionary mission creep, and stuck to police-related issues. Nevertheless, the demonstration dispersed shortly afterwards.

Communism and hunger go together like communism and gulags.

Don't look now, but Xi's regime is crusading against food waste.

Food shortages are in the offing for the Chinese workers' paradise. 

Hard to believe, I know.

According to the pattern, the next steps will be shooting wreckers and then dekulakization.

Somebody check to see if China's newly-rich are buying more American residential properties--with currency controls, bolthole-purchases would be a very telling barometer.

More "mostly peaceful" demonstrations.

Chicago's "Magnificent Mile" was subjected to considerable looting last night.

Social justice is an ever-evolving phenomenon, it seems:

The unrest began shortly after midnight and anti-police graffiti was seen in the area of the Magnificent Mile, which is one of Chicago’s most-visited tourist attractions. Hours earlier, dozens of people had faced off with police after officers shot and wounded a person Sunday in the Englewood neighborhood, located about 10 miles (16 kilometers) away.

Brown said after a crowd dissipated following that shooting “we are monitoring social media and we come across a post of a caravan of cars being prompted to go to our downtown and loot.”

Along the Magnificent Mile, people were seen going in and out of stores carrying shopping bags full of merchandise as well as at a bank, the Chicago Tribune reported, and as the crowd grew vehicles dropped off more people in the area. On streets throughout the downtown area, empty cash drawers from stores were strewn about and ATMs were ripped open.

Stores miles from downtown were also ransacked, with parking lots littered with glass and items from inside the stores. Clothes hangers and boxes that once contained television sets and other electronics were seen – evidence that thieves had taken racks of clothes and removed them from the hangers.

“This was obviously very orchestrated,” the Rev. Michael Pfleger, a prominent Roman Catholic priest and activist on the city’s South Side, told WBBM-TV as cameras panned the downtown area.

When you've lost the Rev. Pfleger....but such happens in every revolution. The vanguard eventually gets a tumbrel ride as expectations mutate and take on a grimmer visage. 

The French revolutionaries had Liberte, Egalite, Fraternity.

 America's social justice vanguard has If it's a chain, it's free rein.

Though mistakes will inevitably be made.  

Still, as history shows us, you can't have a revolution without breaking a few....million kulaks.

[Afternoon Update: Chicago authorities literally raised the city's drawbridges to keep the violence from intensifying. 

A Twitter wag: "I actually had "fortified cities making a comeback" on my 2020 bingo card."]

Dunning-Kruger Incarnate.

That would be Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo of the Airline Terminal News Network.

Yesterday, while they were agreeing with the Year Zero Statue Purge, the duo regaled those waiting in Boarding Zones 4-9 with this nugget of insight into the beliefs of 2 billion people across the globe:

“Jesus Christ, if that’s who you believe, if that’s who you believe in, admittedly was not perfect when he was here on this earth.”

The latter of the duo is allegedly a practicing Catholic, and nodded along amicably. Not so by the way, he resents being called "Fredo," so much so that he spectacularly beclowned himself in his initial objection to the moniker. But as yesterday shows, he confirms on a regular basis why the nickname fits. Truly, Cuomo's only qualification for his role is his surname, but like the poor, nepotism will always be with us.

The former is also a staggeringly-incompetent blowhard even by the low standards of television journalism, but he thus far lacks a compelling nickname. Then again, he doesn't rise to the level of one. He's a nonentity, gaining the notice of the public not trapped in transportation hubs only when he says things like the above. Were it not for his media perch, it is difficult to envision a job he could do outside of sales, where soothing customers with affirming bullshit is a useful skill.

If you have noticed a strain of anger in my posts on various topical matters, you are correct to do so. It stems from a constant low-grade despair. Right now, the two things I have been centered in for my adult life, faith in Almighty God and love of country, are punchlines for the ruling class of both church and nation. A coalition of venal bureaucrats, radical partisans and too-immature youths in the grip of a mob mindset are ascendant in both.

Well, active youths mobbing about aren't exactly a major problem in the Catholic Church--three generations of "it doesn't matter" have sunk in. But otherwise the problems are congruous.

And there is almost no resistance in either case. The center cannot hold because there is no center. All is an accelerating spiral downwards, growing more vertiginous and hallucinatory in its madness.

The lamps are going out all over the world, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.

Maybe the despair isn't so low-grade after all.

"Recontextualization."

Get used to that nasty little euphemism.

Boston is removing the city's Emancipation Memorial.

And if you thought it would end with Confederates.... it won't end.

The Cluster B histrionics being indulged here will just move to the next disordered grievance. And then the next. Then the next, ad infinitum.

And why not? There is no resistance and for a moment they get the buzz of minor celebrity and pretend heroism.

Here you go for the story, and the template for the future:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/07/01/us/boston-statue-removed-trnd/index.html

Memes!

Today, it's all about communists.

Sold out by "free" trade.

When the final chapter is written on the coronavirus era, there will be plenty of blame to go around.

First, and foremost will be the reigning communist tyrants in Beijing.

A close second will be the madhouse offshoring of vital American manufacturing to said communist tyrants.

The free trade idolators said that trading with China would make it a responsible member of the world community. It certainly made the communists and American corporations and outsourcing consultants richer than Croesus. But none of them are responsible for anything save untold misery, either through lost jobs or lost lives.

China’s move toward manufacturing dominance began more than 30 years ago when the country adopted a series of economic reforms. Congress granted China permanent normal trade relations status in 2000, and in 2001, China joined the World Trade Organization. As additional trade restrictions were lifted, China attracted new investors and companies looking to lower manufacturing costs. 

U.S. companies were among those setting up shop in China, including mask makers 3M and Honeywell.

By 2011, China’s exports had grown by more than 500% while manufacturing employment in the U.S dropped by almost 20%, at least two million jobs. China became the biggest supplier of imports to the U.S., about $452 billion worth in 2019. 

“America’s mask makers left America in an uncoordinated mass exodus,” said Mike Bowen, CEO of Texas-based Prestige Ameritech, one of the nation’s few domestic mask manufacturers. 

Today, fewer than 10% of the masks used in the U.S. are made here. And China makes almost half the world’s masks, gowns and gloves and other PPE. 

So, when China nationalized its factories in February and directed all mask production to domestic use, that left the U.S. and much of the world in a quandary.

"Quandry" is one way to describe having your clockweights in a vice, I suppose.

And no, the Chinese are not behaving any more responsibly. To the contrary.

Furthermore, a so-called great nation that cannot make basic painkillers to treat patients is not great.

But I'm sure that Joe Biden has a plan to make us more independent and bring jobs home.

Unlike what happened during the Administration he was Veep for.