[PJMedia] A Buffalo, N.Y., teenager who spent 10 hours cleaning up after the riots is being recognized around the country for his service.
Antonio Gwynn Jr. took it upon himself last week to spend 10 hours sweeping up broken glass and removing garbage from the streets strewn by rioters. Gwynn has already gotten a scholarship offer from a local college, a 2004 Ford Mustang from an admirer, and a job offer from the mayor.
It’s stories like this, amid the chaos, name-calling, and hate that give me a sliver of hope for the future. Gwynn is a black teenager who went out at 2:00 a.m. while the fires were still burning to do what he could to help his community. Where some sought to destroy, he wanted to build.
It turns out, Gwynn did it because it was something his late mother would have done.
ABC4:
“The car he sent me a picture of was the same exact car that my mom first had got me. And, it’s the same color, the same everything,” Gwynn said.
Then comes in Bob Briceland from Briceland insurance agency.
They will be covering Antonio’s insurance for one year.
“I just felt compelled to help him out. We just need to get together our whole city and show people how there are so many good people here,” Briceland said.
The news that he was getting a full scholarship to Medaille College in Buffalo made him cry.
“I literally stopped, pulled over, and started crying. So did my great aunt. My little cousin did also,” Gwynn said.
His original plan was to go to a trade school and save up for college.
Now, he can complete that goal right away by studying business and studying mechanics on the side.
This way, one day, he can start his own repair shop.
“I always wanted to be someone that can help everyone with their car problems. This is a great opportunity I have right in front of me,” Gwynn said.
Yes, he’s for real. There are still people like this in America. And it’s good to be reminded of that in times like this.
#2
I didn't even have to read the article to figure out the the young man was black. Of course, such "good news stories" will be played up. Sure, all fine and nice, but given the media's propensity for certain things, I'm skeptical of the motives.
If it seems as if every one of our trusted institutions recently lost all credibility, that is an illusion. They didn’t suddenly get worse. You got smarter. Trump did that to you. It wasn’t planned. But it was predicted.
#3
Charger - They didn't have much credibility to us, looking in from the outside, but to a lot of people (a plurality, if not the majority) inside their country, Soviet institutions successfully brainwashed people for decades.
#8
@#5 (JFM) - I was thinking mostly along the lines of the state-run education system, but I can think of DoD and the silly "mandatory" training that is conducted or the gimmicky nonsense such as a 1SG wearing high-heeled shoes to "feel" what it's like to be a woman to commemorate something PC.
in these trying times we need to see this again
Three scientists (Scarlett Johansson, Kyle Mooney, Mikey Day) receive a shock when they debut their invention, a machine that translates for pets.
[Washington Examiner] A new report shows Illinoisans are hurting financially more so than most of the country during the COVID-19 outbreak.
The financial website SmartAsset compared the 50 states across six metrics, including recent measures of unemployment, housing insecurity and food insufficiency. Illinois ranked seventh in the nation for financial pain during the pandemic, according to the report.
SmartAsset spokesman Mark LoCastro said Illinois’ ranking was negatively affected by unemployment.
"In Illinois, the unemployment rate rose sharply, increasing by about 13 percentage points which is the eighth largest jump overall in our study," LoCastro said.
With that rise, the unemployment rate in April was 16.4%, 1.7 points higher than the national average and the seventh-highest of all 50 states.
LoCastro said other categories brought Illinois down in the rankings as well.
"Despite low historic poverty rates, recent survey data shows a different picture," LoCastro said. "More than one in four adults recently reported housing insecurity, while about one in eight were experiencing food insufficiencies."
Louisiana, Michigan and Ohio have the most residents financially hurting during the pandemic, while Nebraska, Iowa and Minnesota have the least.
#1
When you start off at the bottom (Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico), its a challenge to be 'hit' hard financially. Got to have something to lose something. New Mexico is cushioned by being a NIMBY state. They have a lot of federal government operations that other states don't want (you want a nuclear waste site?). How much of the government was furloughed? None.
INCERTO via Instapundit
SIX ERRORS: 1) missing the compounding effects of masks, 2) missing the nonlinearity of the probability of infection to viral exposures, 3) missing absence of evidence (of benefits of mask wearing) for evidence of absence (of benefits of mask wearing), 4) missing the point that people do not need governments to produce facial covering: they can make their own, 5) missing the compounding effects of statistical signals, 6) ignoring the Non-Aggression Principle by pseudolibertarians (masks are also to protect others from you; it’s a multiplicative process: every person you infect will infect others).
In fact masks (and faceshields) supplemented with constraints of superspreader events can save us trillions of dollars in future lockdowns (and lawsuits) and be potentially sufficient (under adequate compliance) to stem the pandemic. Bureaucrats do not like simple solutions.
First error: missing the compounding effect
People who are good at exams (and become bureaucrats, economists, or hacks), my experience has been, are not good at understanding nonlinearities and dynamics.
The WHO, CDC and other bureaucracies initially failed to quickly realize that the benefits of masks compound, simply because two people are wearing them and you have to look at the interaction.
Let us say (to simplify) that masks reduce both transmission and reception to p. What effect on the R0(that is, the rate of spreading of the infection)?
Simply the naive approach (used by the CDC/WHO bureaucrats and other imbeciles) is to say if masks reduce the transmission probability to ¼, one would think it would then drop from, say R0= 5, to R0=1 ¼. Yuuge, but there is better.
For one should count both sides. Under our simplification, with p=1/4 we get R0'= p² R0 . The drop in R becomes 93.75%! You divide R by 16! Even with masks working at 50% we get a 75% drop in R0.
Second error: Missing the Nonlinearity of the Risk of Infection
The error is to think that if I reduce the exposure to the virus by, say, ½, I would then reduce the risk, expressed as probability of infection, by ½ as well. Not quite.
Now consider (Fig 1) that probability must follow a nonlinear dose-response, an "S curve". In the convex part of the curve, gains are disproportionately large: a reduction of x% of viral exposure leads to a drop of much more than x in risk of infection. And, patently we are in the convex part of the curve. For example, to use the case above, a reduction of viral load by 75% for a short exposure could reduce the probability of infection by 95% or more!
Third Error: Mistaking Absence of Evidence for Evidence of Absence
"There is no evidence that masks work", I kept hearing repeated to me by the usual idiots calling themselves "evidence based" scientists. The point is that there is no evidence that locking the door tonight will prevent me from being burglarized. But everything that may block transmission could help. Unlike school, real life is not about certainties. When in doubt, use what protection you can. Some invoked the flawed rationalization that masks induce false confidence: in fact there is a strong argument that masks makes one more alert to the risks and more conservative in behavior.
Fourth Error: Misunderstanding the Market and People
Paternalistic bureaucrats resisted inviting the general public to use masks on grounds that the supply was limited and would be needed by health professionals — hence they lied to us saying "masks are not effective". They did not get the inventiveness and industriousness of people who do not need a government to produce masks for them: they can rapidly convert about anything into well-functioning protective face covering appendages, say rags into which one can stitch coffee filters... about anything. Nor did bureaucrats heed the notion of markets and the existence of opportunists who can supply people with what they want.
Fifth Error: Missing Extremely Strong Statistical Signals
Many people who deal with statistics think in terms of either mechanistic concepts (say correlation) they don’t quite understand, or local results; they fear to be presenting "anecdotes", and fail to grasp the broader notion of statistical signals where you look at the whole story, not the body parts. For here, again, evidence compounds. We have a) the salon story where two infected stylists failed to infect all their 140 clients (making the probability of infection for bilateral mask wearing safely below 1% for a salon-style exposure) — we know the probability of infection for non mask wearers from tens of thousands of data points and the various R0 estimations) plus b) the rate of infection of countries where masks were mandatory, plus c) tons of papers with more or less flawed methodologies, etc.
Sixth Error: The Non-Aggression Principle
"Libertarians" (in brackets) are resisting mask wearing on grounds that it constrains their freedom. Yet the entire concept of liberty lies in the Non-Aggression Principle, the equivalent of the Silver Rule: do not harm others; they in turn should not harm you. Even more insulting is the demand by pseudolibertarians that Costco should banned from forcing customers to wear mask — but libertarianism allows you to set the rules on your own property. Costco should be able to force visitors to wear pink shirts and purple glasses if they wished.
Note that by infecting another person you are not infecting just another person. You are infecting many many more and causing systemic risk.
Wear a mask. For the Sake of Others.
Notes
1- I commend the very very very few writers such as Zeynep Tufekci who have been fighting the fight in the media.
2- I truly believe that the pseudolibertarians are sociopaths and misanthropes looking for a political party that they think fits their misanthropy.
Via Insty
[Wash Examiner] Lebanon and Syria are both lurching toward implosion, with popular uprisings or even civil wars an increasing possibility.
In Syria’s case, the underlying challenge is an economy destroyed by nine years of civil war. Yet, where that economy once tottered along with Bashar Assad’s retention of power in Damascus and control over trade, that dynamic has now dissipated. The dictator’s foreign capital reserves are depleted while inflation is skyrocketing amid a shortage of goods and the Syrian pound’s collapsing value.
Making matters even worse for Assad is the fact that his two primary sponsors, Russia and Iran, cannot support him. After all, their economies have been greatly damaged by the collapse in global oil prices — oil exports being critical to their revenue streams — and U.S. sanctions.
Attempting to restrain the growing crisis, Assad has resorted to looting former allies in the Syrian elite. But it’s not working. And things are about to get worse.
New U.S. legislation under the Caesar Act, named for a whistleblower who documented Assad’s torture and killing of political prisoners, will take effect next week, further isolating Syria’s economy. As things continue to decline, Assad will face the growing threat of a revolt from within his Alawite power base. Military officers and financiers in that circle are aware that overthrowing Assad and engaging in serious cease-fire talks with Assad’s opponents would lead to rapid U.S. sanctions relief. An operative question, then, is how much suffering they are willing to accept before jumping to the gun?
Assad’s only insurance here is his family reputation for mass violence as a means of political surety.
Things are little better in next-door Lebanon. Beirut is once again awash with protesters. A new government has been unable to reform the crony-sectarianism at the heart of Lebanese politics, thus obstructing much-needed access to international financing relief. The Syrian economic crisis also plays a connecting role here. Over the past few years, Lebanon’s financial sector has found buffer by providing service in Damascus. But now that Damascus cannot afford that engagement, the money flow has dried up.
All of this poses a particular problem for the Hezbollah terrorist organization, which has long used its powerful militia and cronyism to control Lebanese politics and undermine the security apparatus. But where, as now, all Lebanese are suffering under a common crisis, Hezbollah risks being abandoned by its allies and the possibility of real political reform occurring. That would gut Hezbollah’s influence over Lebanon and its means of exporting the Iranian revolution — something Tehran is keenly aware of.
Where does this leave us?
Well, with the expectation that as the summer heat grows, it will be joined in intensity with escalating economic pain. America should stand firm in support of true political reform in both nations, cognizant of the fact that such reform is the only way these suffering peoples will find final relief.
Posted by: Frank G ||
06/15/2020 00:00 ||
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Link ||
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#1
Hezbollah will have to kick off another war with Israel.
That seems to be their only option to change the game. Not that it's likely to succeed.
[UNZ] The May 25th killing of George Floyd, an unarmed African-American man, at the hands of a white police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota shocked the world and set off mass protests against racism and police brutality in dozens of cities from the mid-western United States to the European Union, all in the midst of a global pandemic. In the Twin Cities, what began as spontaneous, peaceful demonstrations against the local police quickly transformed into vandalism, arson and looting after the use of rubber bullets and chemical irritants by law enforcement against the protesters, while the initial incitement for the riots was likely the work of apparent agent provocateurs among the marchers. Within days, the unrest had spread to cities across the country including the nation’s capital, with U.S. President Donald Trump threatening to invoke the slavery-era Insurrection Act of 1807 to deploy the military and National Guard on American soil, federal powers not used since the 1992 Los Angeles riots following the Rodney King case.
The debate over the catalyst for the uprising into its period of lawlessness has drawn a range of theories. The suspicious placement of pallets of bricks in the proximity of numerous protest sites have spurred rumors of sabotage by everything from white supremacist groups to "Antifa" to law enforcement itself. Predictably, liberal hawks such as Susan Rice, the former National Security Advisor in the Obama administration, made ludicrous assertions suggesting "Russian agents" were behind the unrest, a continuation of the narrative that the Kremlin has been behind inflaming racial tensions in the U.S. that began during the 2016 election. While Democrats like Rice and Senator Kamala Harris of California have revived an old trope dating back to the Civil Rights movement of Moscow exploiting racial divisions in the U.S., Trump and the GOP have similarly resurrected the ’outside agitators’ myth attributed to segregationists of the same era. Hypocritically, many of those claiming to be in support of the protests have denounced the latter theory while endorsing the former, when both equally show contempt for the legitimate grievances of the demonstrators and deny their agency. However, both false notions overlook the more likely hidden factors at play attempting to hijack the movement for its own purposes.
Believe it or not, there could be a kernel of truth in accusations coming mostly from the political right as to the possible role of the notorious liberal billionaire investor and "philanthropist" George Soros and his Open Society Foundation (OSF). Ironically, if any of the right-wing figures of whom Soros is a favorite target were aware of his instrumental role in the fall of communism staging the various CIA-backed protest movements in Eastern Europe that toppled socialist governments, he would likely not be such a subject of their derision. The Hungarian business magnate’s institute, like other NGOs involved in U.S. regime change operations such as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), is largely a front for the CIA to shield itself while destabilizing U.S. adversaries, the spy agency’s preferred modus operandi since the exposure of its illicit activities in previous decades by the Rockefeller Commission and Church Committee in the 1970s. In the post-Soviet world, nations across Central Asia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and beyond have become well acquainted with the political disruptions of the international financier and his network. In particular, governments that have leaned toward warm relations with Moscow during the incumbency of President Vladimir Putin have found themselves the victims of his machinations.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[UNZ] The May 25th killing of George Floyd, an unarmed African-American man, at the hands of a white police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota shocked the world and set off mass protests against racism and police brutality in dozens of cities from the mid-western United States to the European Union, all in the midst of a global pandemic. In the Twin Cities, what began as spontaneous, peaceful demonstrations against the local police quickly transformed into vandalism, arson and looting after the use of rubber bullets and chemical irritants by law enforcement against the protesters, while the initial incitement for the riots was likely the work of apparent agent provocateurs among the marchers. Within days, the unrest had spread to cities across the country including the nation’s capital, with U.S. President Donald Trump threatening to invoke the slavery-era Insurrection Act of 1807 to deploy the military and National Guard on American soil, federal powers not used since the 1992 Los Angeles riots following the Rodney King case.
In other news: New study reveals sugar has 'hijacked' Moon Pies. 
