NOTES

  https://www.shiningcityc4.com/ As I write this, voters in Detroit, MI, are receiving this robocall on their phones: “This is [inaudible] 1699, a civil rights organization founded by Jack Burkman and Jacob Wool. Mail-in voting sounds great. But did you know that if you vote by mail, your personal information will be part of a public database that will be used by police departments to track down old warrants, and be used by credit card companies to collect outstanding debt? The CDC is even pushing to give preference for mail in voting to track people for mandatory vaccines. Don’t be [inaudible] into giving your private information to the man. Stay safe, and beware of vote by mail.” We don’t know who is behind this vicious  vote suppression effort -- the Michigan Secretary of State and Attorney General are trying to find out, but we DO know a couple of things.  Michigan is an absolutely key state in the presidential election, and it doesn’t take a degree in political scien...

Opinion August 29, 2020 Good morning. I’m Paul Thornton, and it is Saturday, Aug. 29, 2020. Fifty years ago today, L.A. Times journalist Ruben Salazar was killed by a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy while covering the Chicano Moratorium march in East Los Angeles. Click  here  to read more about Salazar, and  here  to read our 50th anniversay coverage of the moratorium. Now, let’s take a look back at the week in Opinion. It’s a scene you would expect in North Korea: The leader emerges from his palace to an oddly adoring audience, the collective assets of the state marshaled to exalt him, while out of view the masses endure a health crisis and economic malaise. This describes most recently what happened not in Pyongyang or in Minsk, but on the final night of the Republican convention in Washington, the capital of a nation that  prohibits abusing public resources the way an autocrat would . Heading into the final months of the 2020 campaign, the two parties’ co...

  ¡ BACK TO SCHOOL SPECIAL! INTRODUCTION. There is not too much to report this week. With Georgia's 7.5% growth in the death toll, the pace of the virus has definitely slowed in the many of the states in the South and Southwest (S./S.W.), specifically with the following improvements in the bellwether states of: Arizona with a 26% marginal week-over-week decline in of new cases recorded during the last seven days and a 21% marginal reduction in deaths incurred ; California with a 20% marginal week-over-week reduction in confirmed cases during the last seven days, but a 9% marginal rise in deaths ; Florida with a 26% marginal week-over-week decline in confirmed cases recorded during the last seven days and a 24% marginal decline in deaths recorded ; Tejas with a 23% marginal week-over-week decline in reported cases during the last seven days and a 14% marginal reduction in deaths endured ; as well as, Oklahoma with a 5% marginal week-over-week increase in cases durin...

Opinion August 22, 2020 Good morning. I’m Paul Thornton, and it is Saturday, Aug. 22, 2020. Let’s take a look back at the week in Opinion. And what a week it was. Perhaps we’ve grown so unfazed by chaos that it would take a two-bedroom apartment in Hollywood renting for less than $2,000 to make anyone aware that something had changed , but in a normal world with normal sensitivities, a week as cataclysmically terrible as the one we just experienced would be high in the running for “where were you when” status. Consider: If someone had told you in early 2020, with impeachment fully underway and the world not exactly in great shape, that within the span of a single week in August, enough acreage to cover the entire state of Rhode Island  would burn , all campuses in the state’s largest school district  would be closed to students , we’d have  rolling blackouts for the first time since 2001  — and all this, with overnight low temperatures  barely dipping below 80 d...

  Angelo Codevilla, "The Attempted COVID Coup of 2020", Real Clear Politics , 13th August 2020.   https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/08/13/the_attempted_covid_coup_of_2020_143952.html Purpose:  analysis of this article as a proxy for the argument that recorded cases of COVID are understated by as much as ten times. The political side of the article lies beyond the scope of this essay. B.L.U.F. (bottom-line, up-front): conceptually a plausible argument; data and conclusions presented by Real Clear Politics (R.C.P.) are internally inconsistent and conflict with experience. Introduction R.C.P. is a right-wing publication  tied to the ‘alt-righ t’ brand of conservatism associated with conspiracy theories generally supportive of President Trump. Most alt-right publications are too biased for serious debate or analysis.  Of these periodicals, R.C.P. is considered an intellectually honest, if biassed, publication. Even so, the article reviewed here ...

  Opinion August 15, 2020 Good morning. I’m Paul Thornton, and it is Saturday, Aug. 15, 2020. Let’s take a look back at the week in Opinion. Let’s get something out of the way: Of course it’s racist for President Trump to entertain the execrable legal theory that Sen. Kamala Harris, who was   born in the same California county I was , is ineligible for the vice presidency on account of her parents’ foreign citizenship in 1964. Just as they prattled with President Obama, Trump’s allies are seizing on Harris’ perceived “otherness” — her father is from Jamaica and her mother immigrated from India, a background that Rep. Pramila Jayapal   writes in a Times op-ed article   stirs patriotism in so many Indian Americans — to try to make her seem unqualified on account of her ethnic identities. Michael McGough, the L.A. Times’ senior editorial writer and resident jurisprudent,   dismisses this attack on Harris with Victorian understatement : “To put it mildly, this exer...