We're living a major disaster event in U.S. history (our Civil War fatalities were around 750,000.)
MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
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From the Readers
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From the Dagbloggers
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Hits of the Day
In the News
By Drake Bentley @ Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, updated Feb. 2, 8:03 am CT
(Note: This school shooting was located in Milwaukee's "inner city" or "ghetto". That may explain the lack of national coverage and even the sparse coverage here?)
Milwaukee police are investigating a quintuple shooting Tuesday night on the grounds of Rufus King High School.
Police said teenage girls ages 17,16 and 15, and a 20-year-old woman, were shot around 7:20 p.m. in the 4100 block of North 19th street. Milwaukee police confirmed that the shooting occurred on the grounds of Rufus King High School.
Police initially reported only three teen victims who were conveyed to the hospital and are expected to survive. The department said early Wednesday morning two additional victims — another 15-year-old girl and the woman — presented themselves at local hospitals. They both suffered multiple gunshot wounds are also expected to survive.
Police said they are searching for a known suspect.
The school's girls basketball team was hosting Washington High School Tuesday night.
The quintuple shooting marks the latest incident in what has been a violent start to 2022. In January, there was a mass killing of six people and three Milwaukee area law enforcement officers were shot in separate incidents.
By Josh Gerstein @ Politico.com, Feb. 1
FBI Director Christopher Wray is rejecting claims that his agency’s aggressive investigation of the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6 contrasts with a lackluster response to violence and unrest that accompanied some Black Lives Matter protests across the country during the spring and summer of 2020.
Speaking in California, Wray offered his most detailed public rebuttal yet to critiques of the bureau put forward in recent months by some Republican lawmakers and other allies of former President Donald Trump, as well as attorneys for those charged with crimes related to the Capitol riot.
“We have one standard, which is: I don’t care whether you’re upset about an election or upset at our criminal justice system,” Wray said during an appearance at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley on Monday night. “Whatever it is you’re upset about, there’s a right way and a wrong way to express your being upset in this country and violence — violence against law enforcement, destruction of property — is not it. …That’s what the rule of law is about.”
[....] Reagan Library executive director John Heubusch called the assault on the Capitol a “tragedy” and praised the FBI’s determined effort to hunt down those responsible.
“At the same time, there’s a concern out there in a community that a lot of bad actors did similar things, whether it be to federal courthouses or police headquarters across the United States in the summer of 2020,” added Heubusch, a former executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
Wray insisted that it was “absolutely” true that the FBI was moving as aggressively to investigate crimes related to the 2020 unrest as it is with offenses committed at the Capitol last Jan. 6
“We have in both instances opened hundreds of investigations — in both. We’ve made hundreds of arrests — in both. We’ve used nearly all 56 of our field offices, including our joint terrorism task forces — in both [....]
A German court has found a Syrian former army colonel guilty of crimes against humanity, handing him a life sentence. It was a landmark trial to examine state-sponsored torture during the Syrian civil war.
They are afraid of gang warfare! All 120+ prisons are locked down!
John McWhorter's piece on Affirmative Action in today's NYT is a lot more interesting and provocative than your usual run-of-the-mill op-ed in the "newspaper of record." That is to say it is actually interesting and provocative. A couple of quotes stood out:
I. "But the persistence of the wealth gap, after generations of affirmative action, suggests that somewhere along the way, we’ve missed the mark, policy-wise."
In fact, the wealth and income gap between blacks and whites has grown quite considerably since the late 1950s despite affirmative action's implementation during that time. This is because the gap correlates very closely to income inequality across-the-board and over the past 60+ years, the rich have become exponentially richer while everybody else has either tread water or lost ground (to mix metaphors).
II. "[S]uppose that those aren’t your circumstances, that you’re middle class or above and aren’t Black, Latino or Native American. How would you feel about your kids being admitted to a university because of their “diverseness” from other kids rather than, well, their selves?"
This strikes me as an odd question since it is evident that most people just want their kids accepted into the most prestigious school possible regardless of the reason. That's why some alumni give tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars or even millions so that their feckless offspring can get in.
Does anybody really believe that the children of Presidents are invariably "qualified" to matriculate at Stanford, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton? Yet their parents seem perfectly happy to send them there. Then there are the parents of non-athletes who find themselves admitted to UCLA and Georgetown because the tennis and volleyball coaches unaccountably go to bat for them.
Sadly, college admission decisions are, and have always been, based on far more than the achievements of applicants. The best solution to the problem is to reduce greatly the future expected economic advantages that accrue to those who attend highly competitive colleges and universities and the way to do that is to raise top marginal taxes on the wealthy and to guarantee all meaningful remunerative work.
By PAUL KRUGMAN @ NYTimes.com, Jan. 27
[....] Crypto is unlikely to cause an overall economic crisis. It’s a big world out there, and even $1.3 trillion in losses is only about six percent of U.S. gross domestic product, a hit that’s an order of magnitude smaller than the effects of falling home prices when the housing bubble burst. And activities like Bitcoin mining, while environmentally destructive, are economically trivial compared with home-building, whose plunge played a large role in causing the Great Recession.
Still, some people are being hurt. Who are they?
Investors in crypto seem to be different from investors in other risky assets, like stocks, who consist disproportionately of affluent, college-educated whites. According to a survey by the research organization NORC, 44 percent of crypto investors are nonwhite, and 55 percent don’t have a college degree. This matches up with anecdotal evidence that crypto investing has become remarkably popular among minority groups and the working class [....]