In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

A piece by Joel Kotkin raises some important points on the potential outcome of the Chauvin trial. No politician in American history owes more to African-American leadership and voters than Joe Biden. His flailing campaign was rescued from the respirator by South Carolina’s heavily black Democratic electorate. African Americans sustained his path through states such as Texas. Since taking office, Biden’s commitment to battling the ‘sting of systemic racism’ and encroaching ‘white supremacy’ has accompanied his early actions and seems to have shaped many of his appointments. It's not hard to imagine that Biden, shallow, cynical, and impaired, will follow his worst instincts and allow his handlers to write him statements that will foster unrest if the verdict goes against the progressive narrative. The question is whether we'll have a repeat of Rodney King in 1992 or the 2020 riots. Kotkin thinks we will. i'm not sure. Kotkin says late in his essay: This worry, ...

As I've said, I'm interested in what Alan Dershowitz has to say about the Derek Chauvin trial ongoing in Minneapolis, but he hasn't had a great deal to say about it. So instead, I've been following the commentary of criminal defense attorneys on blogs and YouTube. What I'm beginning to realize is that Dershowitiz is a law professor and an appellate attorney, as well as a media figure, and he's coming at the case from a completely different perspective fron the criminal defense attorneys. In fact, as a media figure, Dershowitz is a bit off key and a bit out of touch. The YouTube video above dates from this past Monday, April 5, and it's based on the trial as of last week. It's plain that his view as of then was that, although Chauvin is not guilty of outright murder, he's got to be guilty of something, maybe manslaughter. But he does see some possibility of either an acquittal or a hung jury. In the video below, although it dates from yesterday, i...

The poor lady has spent her life up to now building the perfect resume to reach what must be the pinnacle of her profession -- CDC director -- only to have her arrival obscured in the blinding celebrity of Dr Fauci, an incompetent time serving bureaucrat 28 years her senior, an old white guy who can go on any Sunday talk he wants, Just the other week, he got to go on CNN with his retired sidekick Dr Birx to complain about the now-departed Trump. Dr Walensky had to watch it from home. In fact, Fauci has taken to contradicting his boss in public, while Dr Walensky doubles down on her prediction of a fourth surge: A more easily spread coronavirus variant first identified in England last year has now become the dominant strain in the U.S., the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Wednesday. The variant, known as B.1.1.7, spread quickly across the United Kingdom and Ireland beginning last fall, with the more infectious version of the coronavirus thwarti...

I started following the Derek Chauvin trial without much interest or enthusiasm, but as I've heard from different bloggers and YouTube commentators, it's becoming clear that as details of Floyd's death in police custody come out in the courtroom environment, there's a great deal more to the story than the media presented ten months ago. And that brought to mind the recognition that last year's dumpster fire was driven both by COVID and l'affaire Floyd, and that in turn reminded me that the Floyd riots, stoked by media coverage, were an alliance of elite radicals and the Lumpenproletariat , a peculair mix. I would normally look to someone like Alan Dershowitz for commentary, but although I assume he's following the trial daily, he hasn't been commenting on it regularly. His take as of last week is below: As of then, he's mildly in favor of the defense strategy as it related to Floyd's girlfriend, who testified on Floyd's addiction, but ...

One thing I'm seeing in this phase of the pandemic is that, although California continues to have unnecessary COVID restrictions, its vaccination policy has been extremely effective. It turned the troubling late 2020 case surge completely around, to the point that LA County statistics are now equivalent to those of a year ago March, at the start of the pandemic . The changes come amid a 97% drop in the number of new coronavirus cases reported each day. The seven-day average of new cases is now slightly under 400 per day, compared to 14,200 daily new cases on Jan. 5, county public health Director Barbara Ferrer said in a news briefing. “This is similar to daily case numbers reported one year ago at the end of March, at the very beginning of the pandemic,” she said. This reflects a statewide policy of aggressively vaccinating the populations most likely to be infected, including those in long term care facilities, their staff, and zip codes with the lowest incomes. Althoug...

A week ago yesterday, Dr Rochelle Walensky, the CDC chief, made her teary prophecy of "impending doom" from a new wave of COVID. Almost on cue, as shown above, the New York statistics, which had been leading so-called national totals, peaked and appear to have resumed a decline. There's nothing new about this. The Imperial College model in March of last year predicted that, by October [2020], more than 500,000 people in Great Britain and 2 million people in the U.S. would die as a result of COVID-19. The model also predicted the United States could incur up to 1 million deaths even with “enhanced social distancing” guidelines, including “shielding the elderly.” Imperial’s modeling results influenced British Prime Minister Boris Johnson to impose a nationwide lockdown and influenced the White House as well. I don't mean to minimize the effects of the pandemic. On the other hand, at this point, we can be confident that COVID is neither the Black Deat...

I'm continuing to look at the COVID trends for individual US states, because it's plain that the claims of people like Drs Fauci and Walensky that there is a "national" surge in cases are highly misleading. Any national increase is actually driven by a minority of states whose patterns don't reflect those of most others. Michigan's case, shown above, is a good example. CNN reports Michigan reported 8,413 new Covid-19 cases on Saturday, bringing the state's total pandemic case count to 692,206, according to the state's health department. Saturday's daily case count is the highest the state has reported since December 7, when the reported case count was 9,350, state statistics show. Just eight weeks ago, state data showed the daily reported case count was as low as 563 cases. Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, said the Upper Midwest is beginning to see its fourt...