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.

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“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.

Words to Live By.

Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution and you get the problem back. 

Sometimes the problem has mutated or disappeared. 

Often it is still there, as strong as it ever was.

--Donald Kingsbury

An unpleasant, necessary read.

Douglas A. Blackmon's Slavery by Another Name chronicles the use of vagrancy and related laws against African-Americans in the Jim Crow South to provide forced labor for every imaginable economic purpose, including industrial work.

I have not finished this book because it is harrowing. But I will, in part because it shows how social systems can warp the law to suit gruesome purposes. And also because history has to be honestly-told, and in full context.

And when I do finish, I'll have an in-depth review.

A brief against a secular canonization.

Colin Kaepernick was blackballed from the NFL in part because of his protests against police brutality--that is true.

But let's remember that he didn't just take a knee during the national anthem.

He is also a committed leftist who has gone far beyond protesting police brutality:

Praising honest-to-God gulag-running communists;

In a proof-texting fail, deriding the entire nation on the 4th of July;*

Prompting the cancellation of Nike sneakers with the American flag (like the NBA, he has nothing to say about Chinese gulags);**

Silently endorsing the accusation that another NFL player is an "Uncle Tom;" and

Comparing himself to a mutilated slave from "Roots."

He is an American who can protest as he likes. And his Nike contract gives him considerable resources, influence and a bright spotlight. Likewise, other Americans are free to notice and remark that his complaint has significantly evolved past police brutality, and is aimed at the legitimacy of the nation itself.

*Note: Frederick Douglass is one of the most impressive men our nation has ever produced. The son of his owner (repeat that until it gets through your head), he taught himself to read. His account of his life as a slave is rub-your-nose-in-it tough, and his words have the ring of Isaiah or Jeremiah thundering against the sins of a hypocritical people who knew better. His harsh indictment of the loudly-Christian slave owners who mistreated their chattel compared to the relative decency of the agnostic who never raised his voice to Douglass provoked a storm, but it was entirely fair.

Yes, the 4th of July speech was and still is lacerating, as is much of his impressive body of work. It stung when I first heard it at the Museum of African-American History in Detroit. Frankly, this is as it should be.

But when one reads Douglass, his unmistakable love of the country despite its gruesome failures is ever-present. And it is impossible to miss that love and his unshakeable belief that America could be better. Only someone ignorant or a shameless proof-texter would use Douglass in any other way.

** Note: I don't buy overpriced sweatshop shoes anyway. But when the Chinese Reich's emblem is ok with Nike and CK, I can only roll my eyes.

Here--have some peonies.

The one constant between the two historical residences of the Metro Detroit Price family is a yearly crop of peonies.

We planted neither set--the previous owners did.

But their trumpet blast arrival every May-June is a natural rite I have come to look forward to. These are a little past peak, but I am still happy to see them.

The white peonies have yet to bloom, but they look good for this week.

Nature cares nothing for the travails or strife of men.

But there is One who does:

If then you are not able to do as small a thing as that, why are you anxious about the rest? Consider the lilies, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass which is alive in the field today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how much more will he clothe you, O men of little faith!

Excerpt from "The Spirit of Liberty" by Judge Learned Hand.

Often described as the greatest American jurist who did not sit on the Supreme Court, federal judge Learned Hand gave this speech in 1944. It was meant to provoke thought, and it does. 

It leaves me quite uneasy:

What do we mean when we say that first of all we seek liberty? I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws, and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lives there, it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it. 

And what is this liberty which must lie in the hearts of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty, and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few - as we have learned to our sorrow. 

What then is the spirit of liberty? I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interest alongside its own without bias; the spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded; the spirit of liberty is the spirit of him who, near two thousand years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned, but has never quite forgotten -that there may be a kingdom where the least shall be heard and considered side-by-side with the greatest.

The full speech can be read here.