Just Flew It

A month ago Nike took Chris Rock’s advice and fled Martin Luther King Boulevard. People are looting the store with impunity–no need any longer to wait for rioting and a subsequent, temporary collapse of order. The raft of legislation against criminal prosecutions generally because they fall too hard on Blacks! and the reign of woke Multnomah County District Attorney have rendered rioting obsolete, from the looters’ point of view; order is suspended indefinitely.

Nike has temporarily closed a retail location in Portland, Oregon, with one of the richest histories in its store footprint because of ongoing theft. 

“People were just going in there with bags already opened and picking up stuff and walking out the door past unarmed security,” Ron Herndon, a Portland civil rights and education activist, told Insider, about the closure of the Nike store on the city’s MLK Boulevard. 

Herndon worked with Nike to open the store in 1984. 

Well, at least they had the right footwear for running away. When you need to flee, choose Nike.

The “community store” was opened after a campaign led by the above mentioned Herndon to bring businesses into Black! neighborhoods. In 2004 the company celebrated 20 years of operation:

“Nike has been a key economic driver for this community, and they are to be congratulated not only for doing business here for the last 20 years, but for being one of the first area businesses to stand up and declare Northeast Portland as a viable community to do business in,” said Ron Herndon, who led the Black United Front in the 1980s and served as a catalyst for encouraging businesses, including the Nike Factory Store, to locate in the community. “Northeast Portland has seen incredible change in the last two decades that simply could not have happened at the speed it did if it were not for the significant commitments made by Nike and others in the business community–both in terms of achieving economic reward and providing community investment.”

When the Nike Portland Factory Store opened in 1984, it pledged to donate a portion of the store’s profits to community-based non-profit organizations…

Nike is still trying to get uniformed police as a condition of reopening the MLK store and for its downtown location near the still-fortified Apple store, where the aesthetic and banners no longer celebrate powerful and fleet athletes in motion, but Black! women and sexual ambiguity. No more stout or svelte mannequins; they’ve all put on weight, let themselves go, and that’s the point; now it’s rotund female figures in yoga poses.

Nike has donated massively to BLM and related causes, and here in Portland the disintegration of downtown is directly related to the BLM riots and subsequent legislation of 2020. But Nike’s money is nothing compared to the cultural effect it leverages with such as their Kaepernick ad campaign–a political campaign under the guise of private enterprise.

So if Nike, once a remarkable Northwest success story, is to die on this hill of shit they’ve created, let us call it the Curse of Colin.

If You Lived Here You Would Be Homeless Now

Depression-era Hooverville, Seattle

Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler recently announced he’s found a site for the first of six planned large-scale camps for the homeless.

PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) – Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler, alongside other city leaders, announced the first possible location of a temporary alternative shelter site during a Thursday press conference, as part of his plan to build six mass homeless camps across the city.

Wheeler says his five-resolution plan is now in the implementation phase, noting his goal is to phase out unsanctioned camping.

“I know people are tired of hearing us talk about addressing this issue, they expect action and today is about direct action we are taking to move this project forward,” Wheeler said.

Wheeler announced the first site will likely be at 1490 Southeast Gideon Street in Portland’s central eastside. He said the city does not have a signed lease on the property at this time but does have an agreement in principle. Wheeler said he is confident the city will secure the lease soon and plans to have the site running by summer.

“Initially, this site will have up to 100 tenants, they can hold up to 150 individuals. This location will help provide safe designated camping locations for homeless Portlanders who then can access basic services like food, restrooms, showers, laundry, electricity and storage facilities,” Wheeler said.

His plan originally envisioned sites for up to 500 campers and was lowered to 250 after pushback from various quarters. This first attempt will attempt to support 100 people with basic services.

The city has picked a San Francisco outfit called Urban Alchemy to run the first Wheelerville. Urban Alchemy, a “workforce development agency”, employs ex-cons to manage homeless shelters.

Urban Alchemy was created in 2018 and expanded quickly from humble origins to capture some of the 1.2 billion dollars San Francisco allotted for homelessness in 2021, through controversial no-bid contracts. Urban Alchemy was the contractor at the center of a scandal involving their management of the Ansonia Hotel as a homeless shelter. The Center for Health Journalism:

The city has more money than ever to combat its homelessness crisis — a $1.2 billion two-year budget bolstered by federal and state funds — yet there’s skepticism about that money being put to good use…

[A] corruption scandal continues to take down City Hall officials like a slow-moving cascade of dominoes, all tied to donations from and relationships with city contractors. Neither the homelessness department nor their contractors have been involved or implicated, but as The Frisc has reported, the six-year-old department has been taken to task for lack of oversight, shoddy contract management, and personnel turnover. It is the only major city department that doesn’t have a formal oversight commission.

At a February hearing about the Ansonia and the $18.7 million contract, Sup. Ahsha Safaí asked Emily Cohen, a top city homelessness official, this question: “If things aren’t going well or are mismanaged, how does the department handle this?”

On one level, the supervisor was voicing concerns that others, from his board colleagues to nearby residents and businesses, were also asking: Is the nonprofit getting this contract — a no-bid contract, no less — ready for this high-profile job?

If no-bid contracts are an indicator, the homeless advocacy industry is being consolidated by a few players:

At the same time, he was addressing recent history. Since 2019, SF’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing (HSH) has leaned heavily on no-bid contracts to create housing and services, part of a strategy to treat homelessness as an emergency. In this era, no-bid contracts awarded by HSH have jumped, as a percentage of total contracts, from 1 percent to more than 40 percent.

Urban Alchemy, the SF nonprofit at the heart of Safaí’s query, is among the organizations benefiting the most from this new era. The group hires people who have experienced homelessness, substance abuse, or incarceration. Its first job in the city, handed off from a parent organization, was in 2018 managing and cleaning portable toilets.

On its website, the group uses a saltier description of its approach: ‘No fuckery.’ It has even applied to trademark it. 

But it seems there has been a bit of fuckery. In February one of the cons working at a shelter in San Francisco shot someone on his break before returning to work.

An Urban Alchemy worker allegedly shot a person while on a break during a shift outside a San Francisco homeless shelter run by the nonprofit in November. 

Joseph Perry was arrested and has been in custody since December. He was charged with attempted murder, great bodily injury, assault with a semiautomatic firearm, discharge of a firearm at an occupied motor vehicle, and possession of a firearm by a felon, among other felonies, in January…

Perry was working a shift at the shelter and was on an unpaid 15-minute break when the incident occurred nearby. He returned for the resumption of his shift, but not for work the next day, the organization said.

Urban Alchemy’s “practitioners” have caught some fire as well:

SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) — The latest victim of crime in San Francisco is a city ambassador from the nonprofit Urban Alchemy.

He is recovering after being shot in the shoulder in broad daylight, in the same alley where a 16-year-old girl was found dead last week of an apparent drug overdose.

“It’s terrible. I was over there on the plaza and I hear maybe three to four shots. Other people said it’s a shooting. It’s not good, but in San Francisco it happens almost every day here. People having guns and shooting over here,” said Vladimir Ivanov, a Tenderloin resident…

The Urban Alchemy ambassadors were not allowed to speak on camera, but could be seen walking down the site in a small group.

Another Wheeler initiative for a car park for the homeless is proposed for an old RV dealership on a major thoroughfare on the east side. Residents are predictably wary.

Oregon today passed a $200 million Affordable Housing and Emergency Homelessness Response Package, so more is on the way. As are more homeless. Here a newcomer says Montana put him on a bus to Portland:

PDX POV 4.17.23

The warming sunlight falls with equal indifference on the evergreens and stray placid people walking or biking along Terwilliger into downtown, just as it does on the squalid scenes there. About ten people were picketing in front of City Hall with BLM signs. Maybe it was the weather, but I thought I’d give them a honk on the horn. They cheered.

The intersection of Fourth and Washington (not yet renamed) is one of our worst. A massive, ugly building that used to function as a small indoor mall has been abandoned and fenced off there since before downtown’s demise. The fence is down in several places, and scattered homeless are in various states of recline on the steps inside. The homeless presence here, centered in front of another abandoned building next to a perpetually besieged convenience store, has been continual for years, but today there are more of them. I parked and walked to the store, to get a closer look, and this happened:

I bought a drink from the weary man of indeterminate ethnicity behind the counter and headed back out. Coming upon the intersection from the other direction and filming surreptitiously I was “made” by a tall skinny negro in a feral afro. “You recording nigga?” I heard from over my shoulder. I pretended not to hear and kept walking to my bike. Casting a glance back I could see him watching me. Imagining myself bolting down Fourth with the whole band chasing me like zombies, I got the key into the ignition while I put on helmet and gloves.

I cast another glance back and he’s got his phone out, coming across Washington toward me.

“Get his license.” A female voice, thick-tongued and garbled by drug use, called out. I pulled away.

I spent less than a half an hour downtown. The numbers of homeless there have increased after having eased up somewhat recently. But the condition of those on the street is noticeably worse. There are levels to homelessness, from the truly helpless to the functioning vagabond, and everyone on the street looked to be of the helpless or homeless criminal class–like my filming friend. The latter supplies the drugs to the former, I’d wager.

Southwest Portland remains relatively normal compared to downtown. Relatively:

Ted, Rested and Ready

Ted Wheeler’s mad as hell and he’s not going to take this any more. The Daily Mail:

Portland‘s mayor turned on a left-wing activist who hijacked a council meeting to air her own views, telling her in exasperation: ‘Nobody really cares what you think.’

Ted Wheeler, a 60-year-old Democrat who took over the famously liberal city in 2017, was chairing a council meeting on March 1 when Keeley Higgins took the floor – and the two engaged in a terse verbal back-and-forth. 

Higgins started her ill-timed rant by saying: ‘Ted, I believe the last time I saw you in this kind of setting was when I gave testimony demanding that you end the use of poisonous gas on humans in this city.’

It’s been a long hard road for the heir of a lumber fortune and former state treasurer. He appears to be a progressive technocrat who thought it would be fun to run one of the most progressive cities in the nation in a time of increasing tax revenue. He took office in 2016. By early 2018, after having been introduced to the regular commandeering of city hall by protesters and other features of Portland politics, he was caught in public saying he “couldn’t wait” for his term to end.

August 18,2018, The Oregonian

Nonetheless he weathered Covid and the riots to become the first Portland mayor to win reelection since 2000, when a spoiler in the race allowed him to beat radical Sara Iannaronne, who had promised to turn the police bureau over to police abolitionist leader Jo Ann Hardesty.

Iannarone supporters launched a recall effort against Wheeler in 2021 that failed to muster the necessary signatures, identifying him with the hated police and their “excessive” response to rioters. Later they sought an extension in court, citing Covid.

The Hail Mary maneuver came hours after the campaign disclosed Monday that it had collected only 40% of the signatures it needs by Wednesday to place a recall of Wheeler on the ballot.

Late last month, an elections official in the Portland City Auditor’s Office, Louise Hansen, denied a request by the recall campaign for a 90-day deadline extension. The campaign’s lawsuit names Hansen and City Auditor Mary Hull Caballero as defendants.

Not all recall attempts or other signature-gathering drives have struggled to gain traction during the COVID-19 pandemic. Oregon City residents upset with their city’s mayor easily gathered more signatures than needed last summer to put a recall on the fall ballot, and voters ousted former Mayor Dan Holladay from office.

Wheeler’s capitulation in 2020 to rioters under the BLM banner, his abandonment of the police, even his ritual humiliation and tear-gassing did nothing to endear him to the radical left and this surrender looks like alliance to average Portlanders. Wheeler, as a progressive liberal, is adjacent to the radical left, and, with the special disdain the radical left has always held for liberals, there be dragons. Big, ugly rainbow-attired, gender-fluid dragons.

The recall effort only collected about 20, 000 votes despite Wheeler’s broad unpopularity; it’s hard to imagine an effort coming from the other side, one seeking to recall him for losing the city to antifa and Jo Ann Hardesty, doing worse.

Now the man who said he couldn’t wait for his time to end says his time has come.

Seven years ago, Ted Wheeler ran to become mayor of Portland and led with one audacious pledge: He would eliminate unsheltered homelessness in Oregon’s largest city by the end of 2018.

He utterly failed to deliver, however, and today an estimated 3,000 individuals reside in hundreds of encampments all around the city.

The pandemic not only magnified the misery of those living on the streets but also hollowed out the city’s once-vibrant downtown. Last year, Portland experienced record homicides, a slaughter more than twice the per-capita level as Seattle.

Yet Wheeler remains bullish, not only on Portland’s prospects but also on his own leadership capabilities.

“I actually believe that I was made for this moment,” he told The Oregonian/OregonLive.

We’ve only just begun…

New Funky Pox Drops

A new gay disease has arrived via a “drug-resistant strain” of a bacteria that is spread through the ingestion of fecal matter, and newsreader gals are giggling when explaining rimming and other current gay-to-straight fads to le bourgeois. The white lady is courting trouble here calling the practice “very gross.” Yo, Karen, love is love.

“It’s really going to be about control of behavior, oral, kind of fecal spread…among gay and bisexual men…” Well, good luck with that sister..

The “Shigella” virus, discovered in Japan in 1899, calls to mind the Monkey Pox virus that a tourist brought back to the UK from Nigeria in May of 2022 setting up a June “Pride Month” of gay super spreader (unfortunate phrase here) events. Despite having condemed public gatherings in the service of Covid hysteria, not a peep could be heard in the national media suggesting gay men maybe take it easy just this one summer.

Needless to say there’s even less of a hint that gay men should responsibly consider the broader straight world and what their exotic practices might unleash upon it. But we are living in the post-AIDS world and that doesn’t mean–as it once did to quietly hopeful boomer liberals–that we became more conservative about sexual relations, but rather that we must approve of any and all homosexual behavior, epidemiological and moral consequences be damned, lest gays be compelled to keep it in their pants once in a while.

Dishonest AIDS propaganda beginning in the eighties telling people “everyone” was at risk preempted any discussion of responsibility, as intended. Though we’ve long known it’s virtually impossible to get AIDS from heterosexual practice, the residual impression remains among the ill-informed mass that one heterosexual coupling with an infected partner is a death sentence.

Michael Fumento wrote in 1987:

The reason AIDS is not “exploding” is that, contrary to public belief, it is a disease that is extraordinarily difficult to transmit or contract, even by the standards of other sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). Whereas mere juxtaposition of genitalia is enough to transmit syphilis, gonorrhea, herpes simplex II, and chlamydia, all of which require only direct contact with the mucous membrane, HIV (like hepatitis B) is bloodborne, the most inefficient mode of transmission an STD can enjoy. A sore, even an undetectably small one such as often accompanies herpes, might offer a passageway for these viruses, but some sort of passageway is needed and in the case of most Americans such passageways do not exist…

The reason anal as opposed to vaginal sex is so dangerous has to do with the difference in tissue construction between the male urethra and rectum and the female vagina. While the vagina is constructed of tough platelike cells that resist rupture and infectious agents, and are designed to withstand the motions of intercourse and childbirth, the urethra and rectum are constructed primarily of columnar cells which tear or rupture easily. This allows semen to enter the more readily accessible blood vessels of the rectum or, conversely but much more rarely, allows blood from a ruptured rectum to seep into the urethra of the active partner. (The April 1987 AJPH study found that men who reported rectal bleeding were far more likely to become HIV-positive than those who did not.)

Heterosexual transmission of AIDS turned out to be a deliberate lie, necessitated by the need to obscure the inherently unhealthy nature of anal sex and gay promiscuity.

Discussing the sexual transmission of AIDS without mentioning homosexual behavior in general and anal sex in particular is like discussing syphilis without mentioning intercourse. But this is precisely what the media and other responsible authorities do. Most articles and wire-service stories on AIDS do not so much as mention the words anal sex, much less indicate that it is the overwhelming risk factor. Similarly, one AIDS book designed for use by elementary-school students refers to heterosexual sex while making no reference to homosexuality, and one sex-education text formerly distributed in Seattle took the final step by stating that “AIDS is not a sexually transmitted disease.”

The untold story of AIDS is how it acts as the gay holocaust. What was the worst public relations problem in history was turned into a triumph, replete with religious mythology and quasi-Christian suffering, placing gays at their present spot atop the hierarchy of grievance which lords over us.

Should we be surprised? They had all the talent for just this sort of thing. AIDS was when all that gay genius that had been making cinema for straights started telling its own story. And it’s killing us.

Robert Kennedy Jr’s book The Real Anthony Fauci contains a remarkable chapter alleging the AIDS virus as we understand it is a hoax. There’s not time (or expertise) here to go into that, but Kennedy’s account of Anthony Fauci losing his battle with gay activists and adopting their propaganda-centric approach, scaring the straights into thinking they were at equal risk–to keep the blame off the gays and to keep the money for treatment coming in–is notable here.

Randy Shilts, who has rationalized the spread of the heterosexual-AIDS myth, is also frank to concede the irresponsibility of this approach: “ In two or three years heterosexuals are going to wake up and see that they’re not getting the disease. Then what?” Then what, indeed?

He need not have worried. We learned a lot of things from AIDS. One is that there is no accountability, for some people. Here’s Shilts quoting Fauci spreading the misconception that casual contact could transmit the blood-borne AIDS virus:

“The finding of AIDS in infants and children who are household contacts of patients with AIDS or persons with risks for AIDS has enormous implications with regard to ultimate transmissibility of this syndrome,” Fauci says. “If routine close contact can spread the disease, AIDS takes on an entirely new dimension,” he adds.”

Shilts eventually became a hero for his book And the Band Played On (and then dying of AIDS) but he was reviled by activists during his life for advocating for things like shutting down San Francisco’s gay bathhouses and for speaking honestly about the nature of gay promiscuity.

Another remarkable feature of the AIDS (cultural) debacle is that straights were exposed to the hyper-sexuality of gay culture, just as it introduced a harrowing disease we all (supposedly) had to fear, and the eventual effect was not condemnation but normalization of that culture.

The trouble was that, by definition, you had a gay male subculture in which there was nothing to moderate the utterly male values that were being adulated more religiously than any macho heterosexual could imagine…Promiscuity was rampant because in an all-male subculture there was nobody to say ‘no’ – no moderating role like that a woman plays in the heterosexual milieu. Some heterosexual males privately confided that they were enthralled with the idea of the immediate, available, even anonymous, sex a bathhouse offered, if they could only find women who would agree. Gay men, of course, agreed, quite frequently.

Fauci gave in to the gays’ demands to keep the bathhouses open and the orgy going, in the same way he gave in to demands to push masks and other Covid measures he knew to be ineffective or worse. If you want to know who rules over you, take a look at–no, don’t look. It’s very gross.

PDX Chaos and Decline Report 3.10.23

Feds’ antifa fantasy league.

This article is paywalled, but the left is out to make hay over the feds even thinking about compiling dossiers on antifa rioters during the national George Floyd riots of 2020:

Homeland Security’s top leaders initially wanted federal agents to compile intelligence reports — dubbed “baseball cards” — on “everyone participating” in Portland’s racial justice protests in 2020, according to new information made public Thursday.

That would be Trump’s DHS, which was aroused in Portland when antifa turned their attention from the downtown police station they had been besieging all summer to the federal courthouse next door, in the process reinvigorating their campaign which had lapsed into low-level nightly mayhem in the occupied park blocks across from both buildings.

With Trump’s executive order of June 26 sending federal law enforcement to rioting cities to protect “monuments, memorials and statues” state and city politicians, including the embattled Ted Wheeler, joined with antifa in denouncing their presence and tactics. Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum filed suit to prohibit the feds from making arrests in the city after antifa complained feds wearing generic “police” patches were “kidnapping” people in unmarked vans before questioning and releasing them. The suit was denied.

It wasn’t as if antifa had been ignoring the federal courthouse up until that point and had already broken in and set small fires early on, prompting the barricading of the building which remains to this day (when they tried reopening it in March of 2021 it was attacked by antifa within hours; one news story claimed the barricades were on trucks headed for Washington DC and the January 6 insurrectionist peril, only to be called back).


June 15, 2020, Mark O Hatfield Federal Courthouse, Dennis Dale Untethered Livestreams

Antifa upped the ante in late July when they started trying to set the building on fire with people barricaded inside. A no-man’s land developed between the tall chain link and concrete barriers and the boarded-up building where federal cops would occasionally emerge to put out the fires antifa set there to draw them out.

July 24, 2020, Mark O Hatfield Federal Courthouse, Dennis Dale Untethered Livestreams
July 24, 2020, Mark O Hatfield Federal Courthouse, Dennis Dale Untethered Livestreams

Federal presence included the Federal Protective Service tasked with protecting federal building, who could be seen about town in their marked cars, a tactical unit form Immigration and Customs Enforcment (ICE), US Marshals, and the Border Patrol’s Tactical Unit (BORTAC), last seen neutralizing the Uvalde school shooter.

Antifa’s curious silence shortly after Biden’s inauguration and their alliance with many of his federal law enforcement initiatives targeting “white supremacy” means it’s a very different environment now.

Walmart abandons Portland

PORTLAND, Ore. (NewsNation) — Walmart is pulling completely out of Oregon’s largest city.

The final two Walmart locations in Portland are set to close at the end of March, at least partly due to crime.

According to a Walmart spokesperson, the stores, which will close March 24, weren’t meeting financial expectations but the decision to close both were based on “several factors.”

The city has been struggling with a relentless wave of shoplifting that the corporate giant says is hammering revenues.

Formerly the loneliest professor at PSU, libertarian woke-raker Peter Bogohsian, is following the retailer out of town. Whether in search of bargains or just tired, like Walmart, of the abuse, I don’t know.

Rando Crazy or antifa or does it matter?

A man who worked in a supermarket in Portland has been arrested in connection with a series of knife attacks on women and was connected to antifa by Andy Ngo, who cited putative ties to a legal defense outfit called Civil Liberties Defense Center, or just another random psycho espousing antifa views, if it makes a difference:

CORRECTION, Feb. 21, 2023: An earlier version of this story referenced a report that the suspect, Christopher Luchini, was linked to the Civil Liberties Defense Center and also reported that the suspect was linked to antifa. While the suspect does appear to support leftist ideas (link here), and while CLDC appears to openly support the “anti-fascist” movement (links herehere and here), it is unknown whether Luchini and CLDC are linked. In a retraction demand sent to The Western Journal, CLDC denies the link, though an aspiring journalist covering a CLDC fundraiser appears to have captured a photo of the suspect at the CLDC event. At this time, however, The Western Journal cannot confirm the authenticity of that photo. The article and its headline have been revised accordingly.

Police in Portland, Oregon, have arrested a man with reported links to antifa in connection with several assaults on women.

Christopher Luchini was arrested Tuesday at a grocery store where he works, according to a news release from Portland police.

Police said the arrest capped an investigation into at least four assaults on young women that took place between Jan. 12 and Feb. 7. Police believed all the attacks were conducted by the same person.

Three women were injured and required hospitalization, while the fourth escaped without injury.

Ngo’s reporting appears hasty, but a student journalist from a West Linn high school posted a photo Luchini at a CLDC fundraiser.

Fourth member of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers found in Oregon. West Linn High School Student Media

Black Malice in da How-iss

Forcing on a people a morality at direct odds with their reality is a form of humiliation. When that reality is already a humiliation–here I speak of the routine violence Blacks! inflict on non-Blacks! and the attendant “morality” holding that whites and their culture routinely inflict violence on Black! people–it’s not too dramatic to think of it as a sort of slavery.

The reality is Blacks! are the bullies of America, in its schoolyards, on its streets, in politics and culture; the image of the defiantly slack-jawed Black! thug taunts us against the backdrop of hoary civil rights kitsch that is our present hell.

You aren’t allowed even to laugh at the outright absurdity of that. To force on a people a morality at direct odds with a reality at once violent, impoverishing, humiliating and absurd suppresses a variety of valid and necessary human emotions: one is not allowed to laugh, to disdain, to fear, to discern, to hate. One is not allowed to be human. That most will call this racist hyperbole just shows how far gone we are.

We have to be able to say it, and we must ridicule and disdain all who humor it. That’s a long list. There are eminent people, good people, accomplished people there; but, God help me, silence is violence.

I don’t blame Blacks! for any of it; the most racist thing I can say about them is that they’re incredibly impressionable. The culture assigns no moral agency to Blacks! and neither do they. We indulge this our most impulsive and impressionable class and it’s literally killing us.

Embarrassing trends can’t help but reveal themselves despite the media’s best efforts, largely due to the U.K.’s Daily Mail making a good business out of picking up the money the US media leaves on the sidewalk, lurid true tales that draw readers but contradict official media propaganda. In our perverse time the apolitical tabloid mentality is is one our last tethers to reality. In America “if it bleeds it leads” still–but not if Blacks! draw the blood. The Mail didn’t get the memo. I suspect some day they will, and the loss will be felt.

Despite the image of the Mail as red meat for Middle English bumpkins, its point of view is above all conventional, politically correct and neoliberal–currently acting as a propaganda mouthpiece for Western involvement in Ukraine, for instance. The paper continues to infuriate the elite by covering things like (and probably above all) Black! violence. But the Mail still observes the first rule of Black! violence: one shall not name it. It’s comic watching the paper studiously observe this while showing us the thing, over and over, as if trolling. Sometimes I detect a smirk there, like when their right-hand celebrity news column tantalizes you with photo galleries of “Lizzo Slaying in a Two Piece!”.

Then there’s Tucker Carlson, who has indeed named the thing at least once. Despite the hate he inspires in the media he is actually a champion of the quaint, outdated approach to race relations. He’s the sort to quote Martin Luther King on “the content of character”–but never to acknowledge that, yes, we have by now had a good hard look at the content of Black! America’s character, and the sight is chilling.

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Scott Adams has of course caused a stir by pulling a Trump (as a longtime student of Trump perhaps it’s deliberate) by outraging conventional pieties stating crudely something that isn’t supposed to be said when he drew attention to Black! malice. A regime of censorship is a permanent state of crisis for those who wield it, and the more suppression they effect the more conspicuous are these truths that escape out into the wild of public consciousness; exposing not only the truth but the suppression of it. Truth, no matter how obvious, comes like a horn blast when escaping the constriction of censorship.

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Black History Slump

It’s been a slow Black History Month.

https://twitter.com/bizzzDJM

@DuosEquis

It comes as DEI jobs are getting hardest hit in the present round of tech layoffs and new openings are drying up:

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) teams are being cut as tech leaders commit to massive layoffs.

Twitter’s layoffs are a dramatic example in which the DEI team has been reduced from 30 to just two people this year according to Bloomberg.

The business news site also reports that many DEI departments are not being set goals or having recruitment frozen altogether with responsibilities being shared between other staff.

And, according to Textio data, listings for DEI roles are also down 19% from last year.

“Go woke go broke” triumphal rightists will say, with their eternal hope corporations will right themselves or go away, but a lot of this is companies dumping the excess excess baggage they acquired courtesy of George Floyd’s Racial Reckoning Tour of 2020.

This is a stark contrast from 2020 when, after George Floyd’s murder, when according to Indeed data DEI job postings rose by 123%.

Working the DEI grift works a bit like aerospace or autos here with mass layoffs following mass hirings. George Floyd came to the industry like a Boeing contract to build hundreds of new planes for somebody.

There’s a seasonal market for Black! speakers during Black! History Month, and it looks like they typically book months in advance. There’s a high end:

I mean, these are the big leagues of Black! grief:

“Booking Info”? You mean like arrest booking info?

There are more thrifty options if you can’t afford the ordeal of Angela:

Perhaps in an attempt to set this Black! History bitch off, an Oregon lawmaker is complaining about getting pulled over by state troopers three times, in February. How can that be a coincidence?

“That Tweet came on the first day of Black History Month and it was on a Wednesday. That Monday, I had a stop that I didn’t Tweet about. And then Tuesday I took to the floor of the House of Representatives to speak out against what happened with Tyre Nichols and really reflected on how I could have been Tyre Nichols. And so, for me to be pulled over the day after that really just had me going like, ‘What the heck, man?’” Nelson told KOIN 6 News.

“What the heck man” needs to find its place in the canon of Black! slogans. What the heck indeed, my brother.

Well there’s still a week left to fix racism. But imagine the relief you would feel at one of these large companies in learning there will be no big Black! History Month speech this year. There’s a cancellation we can all get behind.