Oregon’s recent heat wave, where temperatures reached as high as 116 degrees, has killed about a hundred statewide and has inspired a biblical sense of catastrophe here.
Deborah Kafoury, Multnomah County Chair and second-generation Oregon power broker, has promised a “deeper analysis” to document the racial disparity in deaths and our concomitant failure of the “BIPOC” community.
Multnomah County Chair Deborah Kafoury on Sunday, July 4, promised “a much deeper analysis” of the historic heat wave as the county death toll rose to 64, more than half the number of the entire state.
The analysis will include “how to plan for the future,” the county said in a press release
Appearing on the CBS news show Face the Nation Sunday, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown said the record-breaking heat was a “harbinger of things to come” that disproportionately harms minority communities.
Kafoury is confident she’ll find racial disparities at the county level (deaths statewide are mostly white and older) that can be translated into political advantage. Everything now, policy, plans, crises, must be examined for racial disparities which must then be corrected. Morally inconceivable is the possibility that these outcomes can be explained by behavior and that, say, black people have as poor a record of preparing for emergencies as they have of preparing for life generally.
I’ve fancied black “dysfunction” as a sort of “nuclear fuel rod” of demagogic energy, because it will always be there, producing the misery and resentment that is the fuel of the racial demagogy that has taken over. It’s permanence is a feature, not a bug, and I’m sure some of the smarter ones in high places understand that only too well. But more precisely it isn’t the “dysfunction”–arguably not the right word for it–it’s the disparity that is the source.
Despite our mass delusion, black civil rights has become preeminent not because of its justice, but because it is an irresistible vector by which all opposition to power is effectively attacked. Disparity is the license for which the elite claim all manner of new powers and plans. In the case above, disparity will be cited to justify not just the usual transfer of funds to political clients, but “climate friendly” legislation, as a matter of “justice”, and becomes part of the broader global effort to redesign society and the economy to suit the elite. Disparity has become the universal solvent dissolving opposition to power.
Preliminary information shows the people who died ranged in age from 44 to 97, with an average age of 68. The majority were white. Many were found in their homes, with no air conditioning or fans. The county released a map on Saturday showing the deaths took place throughout the county, with the greatest concentration in Lents.
Local activists were demanding the demographic breakdown before the temperature came down.
Driving the inexplicable success of the BLM movement is the effectiveness of racial kitsch as a bludgeon to smash opposition to virtually anything. The daily petty outrages, critical race theory’s notion of pan-racism imbuing everything down to the cell; these are important. Things have changed so drastically so quickly because the rhetoric and actions of the devout found less and less resistance as they proceeded, and the instances and derangement of their charges expanded exponentially in this still unsettled environment.
In this light you see the real value of ethnic diversity to the powerful. Those disparities are the point, and if the elite were honest they’d raise a monument to them. A black dullard would personify it well. Perhaps we can recommission one of the George Floyd statues for the purpose.
untethered 