White Witch

She appeared without warning Thursday morning, like a grieving mother, standing vigil at the Ghost Bike corner. Six years ago, a man was killed on his bicycle at this intersection. It was unusual for a hit and run as it took place in a residential neighborhood at Christmastime. Due to quirks in the street grid, our little enclave is closed to thru traffic, which meant the driver likely either lived here or knew someone who did, and a local mystery was born.

Signs appeared, urging confession, an appeal to conscience, a whisper to authorities.  None came. After a year, the Ghost Bike was removed, and the baleful accusation went away with it.

We assumed the sudden arrival of the witch after so many years heralded a revival of interest in the case. Why else would she be there?  It turns out she was a harbinger of something altogether different.

Yesterday I went to Lowe’s and was greeted by this sign at the freeway offramp. I did some masonry work for a few hours, then poured a beer and settled in front of the TV for this:

The looters assembled at three historic civil rights locations: The Grove, Rodeo Drive, and Melrose Avenue.  Then they went shopping in full view of the police.  Beverly Hills didn’t let them in.  Nordstrom’s was briefly breached at the mall, but private security asserted order.

Melrose, on the other hand, is the City of Los Angeles.   Which means they could steal with impunity.  They started small, with the shoe stores.  Hand items, like sunglasses.  LAPD set up a block away and didn’t move in.   The local news stations circled overhead, beaming endless footage of mobs stepping across broken thresholds and scurrying out with all they could carry. The disembodied voice of Mayor Garcetti played host, murmuring concern as he called into each station to announce an 8 pm curfew the police had no intention of enforcing.   He didn’t dare show his face on TV, and the news anchors didn’t inconvenience him by asking what he intended to do about the breakdown in public order.

Properly incentivized in real-time, looters brazenly pulled up in cars.  They worked in teams.  They moved up to luxury items.  Finally, the Mac store was cleaned out completely while getaway drivers idled out front, trunks open and ready.  This went on for hours.

I can’t tell you how depressing it is at this point in my life to note nearly all the looters in Fairfax were black and gleeful and to hear the tawdry excuses offered for them by the media, as though pigmentation rendered one incapable of moral agency. The sin of looting was not that stealing was wrong, but that it was a distraction. America’s irredeemable racism is non-negotiable. Theft invites disapproving response from white people, who should not be speaking at all right now, only affirming.

If the goal last night was for no black person to be seen in handcuffs, the police could have done business owners a whole lot of good simply posting a uniform in front of each storefront with a camera recording license plates and faces.  They may have been told not to protect, but the least they could do was serve.

But that’s the point. We have entered a new era, haven’t we?  E Pluribus Unum no longer prevails.    The media chooses which groups must submit to the Law and those which are immune. Homeless encampments were the beginning.  Once we carved out a subset of the population to whom the rules did not apply,  our Portlandization was inevitable.

Tonight the looting is widespread. Santa Monica. Long Beach. The White Witch is here.

A Short Walk From Emily’s House

I encountered this guy around the corner yesterday. He had wandered into the neighborhood from Sepulveda, sweaty and disheveled, muttering on the curb as he loaded his crack pipe…unfettered by self-consciousness, so deep was he into the finger rituals of addiction.

Like my beloved Los Angeles, he was in a state of nervous prostration.  A herald of self-destruction. It made me think of our three-month bender of submission to safetyism and power-tripping bureaucrats.   So many of us remain insensible to reason. Hopeful data do not appease us. Hard facts of morbidity do not move us. We’re all Emily Dickinson now, cowering at the top of the stairs.  We hide behind our duty masks and wait for someone else to be the first to defy authority, lest we are ratted out on social media.

When we take the full measure of the economic damage inflicted upon ourselves and face with clear eyes our willingness to swallow propaganda from a garden hose we will look back on this time as one of madness. We will tell our children by way of explanation for the debt we hand them, forgive us, it was sort of like we were smoking crack. 

“I am growing handsome very fast indeed! I expect I shall be the belle of Amherst when I reach my 17th year. I don’t doubt that I will have crowds of admirers…”  When admirers failed to appear, roaring disappointment contracted Emily’s world. She ventured no further than the garden gate, then the sitting room, finally her bedroom, where she retreated for the remainder of her life.  Amherst became that terra incognita signified on ancient flat earth maps by sea dragons.

“A prison gets to be a friend,” Dickinson famously said.  As we emerge from the lockdown, will our pent up creative energies prevail,  will the animal spirits of commerce revive fully intact, or will we find ourselves diminished somehow? Marked by a limp?  Will we embrace a newly discovered weakness?

Here Are The Rules…

Liberty, meet nemesis

My beloved Los Angeles has crossed the rubicon. The stay in your house,  keep the economy on life support,  we love telling the little people what to do ethos has been made semi-permanent. The Wuhan virus restrictions shall remain in place until there is a “cure”.  Because science this woman says so.

And this guy.

What began in the name of flattening the curve now continues in perpetuity, or until there is a vaccine.  That’s not the premise we began with, is it?   See how quickly that happened?  Once surrendered, civil liberties are not easily regained.

In all likelihood, there will not be a vaccine before the end of the year. It is possible we may never have one.  There has never been a cure for the flu or any other variant of coronavirus.   There is only mitigation.

A warm climate and car-oriented sprawl prevented a spike in the curve in Los Angeles. So what now is a power-tripping, virtue-signaling bureaucrat to do?

Mandatory Face Coverings!  Anywhere outside your house! Let a militia of Karens go forth to inform on their neighbors…

The LA Times continues to act as though its proper role is that of Mayor Garcetti’s PR firm: “Here Are The Rules” squeals the headline proclaiming his new dispensation. No questions of why, or how long, or what data is underpinning the decision making.  No mediating of the public interest, just diktat from court eunuchs.

Let us ask a few questions the Times is incapable of.

-We have never before quarantined healthy people.  Why are we doing it now?
-In March, we were told masks were unnecessary. We were also told specifically to go forth and enjoy the sunshine.  Why now the masks and restrictions?
-Our only lasting defense, absent a vaccine, is herd immunity. The lockdown prevents that. Show the math that proves we will be healthier at years end without it.
-Has any disease ever successfully been locked away in a cupboard?
-Are the secondary health outcomes of lockdown: depression, substance abuse, sedentary behavior and delayed preventative care, exacting a greater cost than the virus itself?
-If the risk pool is easily identifiable: i.e.; 80-year-olds and obese people with co-morbidities, why isn’t the quarantine limited to them?
-Why are the 58,000 homeless people in LA exempt from the rules, and what does the absence of an outbreak among them tell us?
-Gov. Newsom has set a benchmark of “no deaths for two weeks” before strictures can be lifted. Is such a target possible? What statutory power is he drawing from?
-There are clinical findings coming in daily from around the world that contradict WHO/CDC guidance. Why is clinical data labeled “misinformation” if it is found to be effective?

Speaking of eunuchs…here’s Rachel Levine, Pennsylvania health czar, mandating, as did New York, nursing homes accept Wuhan virus patients. But not before removing her own mother from a nursing home.  In what dystopian novel did the villains look like this?

Los Angeles is two cities now.  Elites who work from home and rely on delivery while mocking the concerns of the rest of us who have to mix with others in order to obtain a living.   For how long is that sustainable, even in a one-party state?

Mr. UpintheValley is full of questions today.