#FIGHTFOR15: Chipotle Customers Will Suffer if $15 Minimum Wage Passes, Top Executive Warns. The company’s Chief Financial Officer just explained why a $15 minimum wage would ultimately hit customers in the wallet.
Archive for 2021
April 29, 2021
I REMEMBER WHEN THE NYT TOLD US WE WOULDN’T HAVE A VACCINE FOR A DECADE: Moderna ramps up COVID-19 vaccine production, eyes 3B doses in 2022.
THE DOJ HAD A SNEAKY ‘CONTINGENCY PLAN’ IN CASE DEREK CHAUVIN HAD BEEN FOUND NOT GUILTY:
Leading up to Derek Chauvin’s murder trial, Justice Department officials had spent months gathering evidence to indict the ex-Minneapolis police officer on federal police brutality charges, but they feared the publicity frenzy could disrupt the state’s case.
So they came up with a contingency plan: If Chauvin were found not guilty on all counts or the case ended in a mistrial, they would arrest him at the courthouse, according to sources familiar with the planning discussions…
Under the contingency arrest plan, the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office would have charged Chauvin by criminal complaint — a quicker alternative for a federal charge that doesn’t require a grand jury — so they could arrest him immediately, and then asked a grand jury for an indictment, according to sources, who were not authorized to speak publicly.
Again, I believe the jury came to a fair verdict in this case. But if it had gone the other way, the feds were going to arrest Chauvin right then and there? If he’d been found not guilty in a court of law, they weren’t even going to let him go home and grab a shower and a sandwich and maybe a nap before arresting him again? That sounds like something you’d hear about from a banana republic.
Why is this happening and what is going on? Looked at through a wide lens, it is a deeply weird (not to mention WEIRD) phenomena. What sort of country is ashamed of itself? What people wants to be governed by a ruling class that holds it in contempt? What historical precedent is there for a lasting culture whose story-makers are embarrassed by their own ancestors? How can any culture continue into the future if it is teaching its children a deeply disturbing form of racialised self-loathing?
Defenders of the current moment will usually respond that such accusations are hysterical. What is happening in the West, they say, is a long-overdue ‘reckoning’ with our culture’s past: the empires, the colonies, the imposition of our ways of life on the rest of the world. They’re not wrong about much of that history, however partially they tell the story. We know, or we should, that there were plenty of dark chapters in the Western past. If any culture takes to the high seas with cannons blazing and proceeds to paint half the world red (on the map and often on the ground), then at some point a reckoning will arrive. Actions have consequences. God is not mocked.
But this is not a good enough explanation for what is now clearly a process of accelerating cultural disintegration. After all, plenty of other parts of the world – pretty much all of them in fact, humans being what they are – have dark pasts too, but you don’t see Russia’s cultural elites collapsing into spirals of performative shame over how Lenin and Stalin brutalised eastern Europe or killed millions of their own people (on the contrary, Uncle Joe is very popular there these days.) Japan’s murderous history in southeast Asia doesn’t seem to have led to a desire to dismantle its historic identity, and China is certainly not about to start apologising for the last four thousand years – count them – that it has been engaging in imperial expansion.
No, something else is surely going on in the West, and especially in the Anglosphere, which can’t be explained purely by historical karma. Over the last few years, a new and still-coalescing ideology, which has been gathering steam in the post-modern catacombs of America for decades, has burst out onto the streets and into the studios, and is now coursing through the culture, overturning what was until recently uncontroversial or unquestioned. The energy around it is not that of the self-declared love and justice. It tastes of deconstruction, division, intolerance, hatred and rage.
Related: Who fears a society that hates itself? “A country that allows dissent, including the derogation of the state itself, looks strong — and in this respect the control freaks of the CCP, frightened of their own people, look weak. But a country that adopts self-excoriation as its national pastime also looks weak. The Chinese are keeping attentive watch as the West denigrates its heroes, debunks its previous sources of pride, vandalizes its icons, denounces its cultural heritage, slanders its popular majorities as indelibly stained with original sin and rewrites its history to make its past appear as wicked as possible. The spectacle inspires contempt. The Chinese see the self-flagellating throes of the West as the certain bellwether of terminal decline. We’re making ourselves look pathetic. In countries and individuals both, a penchant for self-criticism is only healthy when balanced by some measure of self-belief.”
SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: Bullied, mistreated teens more likely to consider violence, study shows.
NEW YORK POST: Sen. Tim Scott delivers for the GOP — and for the nation.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Watch: Professor Berates Student For Calling Police ‘Heroes.’
HOW BAD ARE THINGS ALREADY UNDER THE BIDEN REGIME? THIS BAD: America is Facing a Chicken Wing Shortage.
WELL, THEN NO NEED TO RUSH WITH THE VACCINE: Single pill cure for COVID-19 could be available this year.
ALL IS PROCEEDING AS ROBERT HEINLEIN FORESAW: Lava tubes used to test space suits for future Mars, moon missions.
FRANCE: Twenty French generals implore the government to take a firm hand against chaos.
In France this week, 20 retired military generals, 80 officers, and 1,000 lower-ranking soldiers signed an open letter expressing concern over “mortal dangers” they say face the Republic. President Macron’s government has instructed the army chief of staff to discipline the signatories for inciting insurrection.
The letter bears close attention on several grounds. Although the signatories warn they wish to act only after the outbreak of civil conflict, Macron’s response shows the government understands the situation has already deteriorated to a point where a true coup or uprising—an event quite unlike the shambolic ordeal in Washington on January 6th—might erupt at the slightest provocation.
At the same time, the letter itself shows just what failures of statecraft and betrayals of representation run the inexcusable risk of provoking the kind of civil breakdown the signatories decry.
The weaker the regime, the more sensitive it is to criticism. The letter (translated) is at the link.
U. OF PENNSYLVANIA CAPITULATES; APPROVES HUNTING, ARCHERY, AND SHOOTING CLUB. Penn’s bogus COVID holdup of approving even remote meetings for the new group was ultimately shot down by pressure from FIRE and attorney Patricia Hamill. Its efforts clicked on an open chamber. Penn’s quiver of excuses ran dry. This attempt at viewpoint discrimination misfired. I have lots more of these, folks.
“URBAN CAMPING”: Austin T Minus 2 Update. “Two days from now, Austin voters will go to the polls to decide the fate of reinstating the camping ban, along with a number of other proposals.”
LIVE IN FIVE… FOUR… THREE…: ‘Five O’Clock Somewhere’ Live Chat with Kruiser, Preston, VodkaPundit.
“NORMALCY:” NCLA Warns About the Disturbing Trend of “Executive Lawmaking” in Biden’s First 100 Days. “Biden’s blitz of executive lawmaking means he has now signed more executive orders than any of the last three presidents had published in the Federal Register in their first 100 days. Biden has issued 41 executive orders, surpassing Trump (25), Obama (19), and Bush (11).”
Related: Dazed and Abused! Biden’s 100-Day Avalanche of Administrative Abuses.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Study: Better sleep may mean better sex for older women.
BUREAUCRATS ALWAYS HAVE CONTEMPT FOR PEOPLE WHO EVADE GOVERNMENT CONTROL: Emails reveal Montgomery County health department’s contempt for nonpublic schools. After seeing how things went last spring, my wife and I made the wise decision to not trust our local public schools to handle the pandemic with even minimal competence, and put our two younger children in a private school. The school has been open full-time all year with no Covid outbreaks. One of the best decisions we have made, and we can’t imagine going back to public any time soon. Imagine the mess after more than a year of no in-person school, with some kids in pods and having tutoring, and other kids, often from non-English speaking homes, having no real education for 18 months! I pity the teachers come this fall who are going to have to deal with this–assuming that my county doesn’t find a way to evade Virginia law and not open full-time.
MAYBE TOO MUCH SO: Polls find most U.S. young people take COVID-19 threat seriously.
FIGHT THE POWER: Parents organizing across US against ‘dangerous’ critical race theory in classrooms: Former professor. “What they are doing with the critical race theory is pure indoctrination.”