vxbush 7/16/2020 7:12:32 AM

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Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University slaps New York Times with $10M suit for ‘made up’ COVID-19 story.

If the lawsuit proves how egregious the news story was--and I think it might have a good case--then you might start to see a lot more lawsuits against the NYT and other major papers. 

vxbush 7/16/2020 7:14:32 AM

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Emergency puppy break!

doppelganglander 7/16/2020 7:29:50 AM

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Reply to vxbush in 2:

The cuteness!

buzzsawmonkey 7/16/2020 7:37:30 AM

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The number of irrelevancies, non sequiturs, and outright lies in this three-minute NPR clip is absolutely breathtaking.

The piece starts out observing that there are few black-owned banks in the US, and about 1/3 fewer than a few decades ago.  It then leaps to unrelated generalities about how "blacks have been excluded from the wealth system," and then leaps to wholly false statements about how this was partly due to the federal government under FDR creating the FHA, which supposedly "pumped money into the banking system" for the benefit of white homeowners, excluding blacks; how this "created the suburbs," how suburbs had provisions in their land deeds which specifically barred blacks from purchasing homes.

Occasional Reader 7/16/2020 7:44:01 AM

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In #4 buzzsawmonkey said: "blacks have been excluded from the wealth system,"

Say, where can I get me a piece a' this "wealth system"?  Is there some sort of registration process, or...? 

JCM 7/16/2020 7:52:35 AM

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When on my morning walk cops friggin' everywhere, not just our city's agency but cars up from Seattle and all the neighboring jurisdictions, a perimeter set up, and the Sheriff's helo showed up just as I got back home.

Check the news... an officer involved shooting a couple blocks away.

Occasional Reader 7/16/2020 7:53:29 AM

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(From late in yesterday's morning thread):

In #45 lucius septimius said: Um ... why do you need a gas mask?

You mean, why do I need a new gas mask?  That's easy... because the old one is pretty old, so one wonders about its ability to seal, etc.

Okay, okay, okay... As to "why do you need one at all"... well, just in case.  Two types of scenarios in minds: 1) Terror attack with a "dirty bomb" or the like, and a circumstance under which "shelter in place" is not an option, I have to GTFO (and don't worry, I have a mask for Little OR, too! An Israeli model specifically for kids, that has a little battery-powered fan unit attached to it to assist in easier breathing); 2) Less dramatically, but somewhat more likely, if there's continued/enhanced leftist rioting, which encroaches on where I live, leading to tear gas being deployed near my home.  

Occasional Reader 7/16/2020 7:54:53 AM

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Reply to JCM in 6:

Yikes, indeed.  Hunker down. 

Occasional Reader 7/16/2020 7:55:37 AM

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In #7 Occasional Reader said: Two types of scenarios in minds

JCM 7/16/2020 7:56:06 AM

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Reply to Occasional Reader in 5:

First decipher the coding on a 100 dollar bill.

Attend the local Mason meeting using the code you found.

Give the secret handshake and met some Rothschilds.

They will introduce you to some Bilderburgers.

If you impress them... your in!

Occasional Reader 7/16/2020 8:04:40 AM

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In #10 JCM said: Attend the local Mason meeting

Okay, I'll get in touch with him and ask him when the next one is scheduled... 

doppelganglander 7/16/2020 8:36:18 AM

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In #4 buzzsawmonkey said: The piece starts out observing that there are few black-owned banks in the US, and about 1/3 fewer than a few decades ago.  It then leaps to unrelated generalities about how "blacks have been excluded from the wealth system," and then leaps to wholly false statements about how this was partly due to the federal government under FDR creating the FHA, which supposedly "pumped money into the banking system" for the benefit of white homeowners, excluding blacks; how this "created the suburbs," how suburbs had provisions in their land deeds which specifically barred blacks from purchasing homes.

That's partially true but presented in a very misleading way. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 granted equal rights to both real and personal property; a person could not be prohibited from buying, selling, leasing, holding, or inheriting property on the basis of race or former condition of servitude. However, if a white person does not want to sell property to a black family, he couldn't be forced to sell. The Act had no effect on discriminatory zoning or financing, either. In fact, at that time, people rarely bought a house with a mortgage other than a 10-year loan with a single payment at the end of the term.  The modern 30-year mortgage was developed during the Depression when millions lost their homes due to the inability to make the final payment. The FHA guaranteed those loans to protect banks from losing everything when a borrower defaulted. The FHA was race-neutral AFAIK, but banks made their own determinations of credit-worthiness, and that's where discrimination often happened.

Suburbs came into existence with the invention of the streetcar. They expanded after WWII due to the housing boom and VA loans. Some suburbs as early as the 1920s had private restrictive covenants that prohibited homeowners from selling to blacks or, equally often, Jews. Those covenants were rendered unenforceable by the Supreme Court in 1948, so they had no legal effect on postwar housing. Interestingly, covenants were extremely common in Portland, home of Antifa, which is still the whitest major city in America.  

doppelganglander 7/16/2020 8:46:53 AM

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Reply to doppelganglander in 12:

Addendum: The 1948 case prohibited a third party, such as a neighbor or a city, to enforce restrictive covenants, but covenants were considered a private contract that was valid between the parties to the sale. Three justices had to recuse themselves because they owned property with restrictive covenants. They weren't completely abolished until the Civil Rights Act of 1968.  

buzzsawmonkey 7/16/2020 8:57:07 AM

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Reply to doppelganglander in 12:

A good summary, to which I'd add that the house I grew up in had a restrictive covenant excluding Jews from purchasing, and the synagogue we attended was built the next suburb over, because nobody would sell the congregation the land at the time.

Suburbs indeed grew up with the expansion of streetcar franchises.  I read some years ago that a Baedeker guide to the US detailed how one could travel from NYC to Chicago entirely by streetcar, riding crosstown lines from one end of a town to another and then taking an interurban line to the next town.  

Many houses were built, or purchased, via credit unions or building-and-loan societies.  The former were often formed by ethnic mutual-aid groups---Jewish, Polish, Italian, etc., because the immigrants were often "underserved" (as today's lingo has it) by conventional banks.  It was also not uncommon to buy houses on contract, i.e., straight time payments.  The Polish family in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle does this---and, of course, loses the house when they miss the payments, as part of the unrelenting misery Sinclair was portraying---but many people successfully bought houses this way.  I believe I mentioned that a friend of my mother's---now in her late 70s, and not "of color"---told me she and her husband purchased their first house this way, as they could not qualify for a mortgage.  I'm surprised contract buying hasn't made a comeback, given the "gig economy"; as a freelancer my entire adult life, I could never have qualified for a mortgage, but having always managed to make my rent, I could have purchased something on contract, aka "rent-to-buy," had such a thing been available.

The Bailey Building and Loan in It's a Wonderful Life is an example of the then-common building societies.  There's a black-granite facade on a building around the corner from me which still has the name of a long-defunct building-and-loan chiseled into the stone, though the bronze letters that would have accented the name have long vanished.

The disappearance of "black-owned banks" is a mark of the success of integration.  Peg-Leg Bates, the one-legged tap dancer, built a Catskills resort for blacks back in the '40s, I think; it went out of business after the Civil Rights Movement made it possible for blacks to go elsewhere.  The disappearance of "black-owned banks" is doubtless partly due to the same cause, as well as to consolidation in the banking business generally. 

Occasional Reader 7/16/2020 9:04:32 AM

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In #14 buzzsawmonkey said: is a mark of the success of integration

Of course, today's race-hustlers and assorted Leftist crazies no longer consider integration to be a "success", period. They want segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.   Progressive values, doncha know. 

buzzsawmonkey 7/16/2020 9:16:35 AM

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Reply to Occasional Reader in 15:

In short, they have adopted the Nation of Islam platform.  The Nation of Islam, in the '60s, opposed MLK and the Civil Rights Movement---Malcolm X, when he was an NOI spokesman, consistently mocked and ridiculed King and his movement---and the NOI's advocacy of complete segregation (they were demanding an all-black Bantustan to be carved out of several states, just like the armed nutbars recently demonstrating in front of Stone Mountain) was enthusiastically endorsed by the American Nazi Party.

doppelganglander 7/16/2020 9:23:10 AM

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Reply to buzzsawmonkey in 14:

Indeed. NPR grossly oversimplifies the situation and leaves out a lot to imply that blacks were uniquely affected. I really wonder if they think all white people either inherit a house or receive a generous down payment from their family. Some people do, but the vast majority do not. 

buzzsawmonkey 7/16/2020 9:34:04 AM

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Reply to doppelganglander in 17:

They completely elide the fact that less-affluent whites---which was most white people even during the prosperity of the '20s, was certainly the case during the Depression, and was true even during/after WWII---were in many ways "excluded" from various financial options no less than blacks.  The mutual-aid societies and other things which people formed to meet these problems were things they devised themselves.

I would also point out that much of Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens was built up by small-time speculative developers---who may or may not have had bank loans to do so.  Abraham Cahan's somewhat-turgid but historically fascinating novel The Rise of David Levinsky discusses how Williamsburg, Brownsville, and East New York were built by speculators---by people who were either working in sweatshops or who owned them, who had saved a little money, and bought options on then-vacant lots and built them up.  The half-blocks of row houses, now considered quaint "brownstone Brooklyn" were largely built by people like this; they'd build four or five or six houses, and would sell them for enough to make a profit and to keep a house for themselves.  It was the same principle used by pot dealers when I was in college; buy a quarter-pound of grass, sell off 3 ounces at a profit and keep the fourth.

doppelganglander 7/16/2020 9:36:09 AM

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Speaking of NPR, it seems no one is listening to them because people aren't commuting. 

https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/07/15/891404076/npr-radio-ratings-collapse-as-pandemic-kills-listeners-commutes

vxbush 7/16/2020 9:38:15 AM

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In #19 doppelganglander said: Speaking of NPR, it seems no one is listening to them because people aren't commuting. 

The same should be true of USA Today and CNN viewership. 

doppelganglander 7/16/2020 9:42:34 AM

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Reply to vxbush in 20: 

I'm sure you're right.

Occasional Reader 7/16/2020 9:47:10 AM

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In #19 doppelganglander said: Speaking of NPR, it seems no one is listening to them because people aren't commuting. 

My heart goes out to them.

HAHAHAHAHAHA

buzzsawmonkey 7/16/2020 11:02:19 AM

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It's been three months since you said to me
Gotta lockdown for two weeks to try to stop a virus
Two months since you laughed and said
Just two more weeks as we try to slow the spreading
Six weeks since you said that we
Needed just a little month more to flatten down the curving
Now you're saying we should all wear masks
And a cold day in hell when you say that you're sorry...

---apologies to the Barenaked Ladies' "One Week"

JCM 7/16/2020 11:24:11 AM

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Reply to JCM in 6:

Deputies shoot, kill suspect in stabbing at Shoreline apartment building

doppelganglander 7/16/2020 12:01:06 PM

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Reply to JCM in 24:

That's much too close. Glad you're safe.

Occasional Reader 7/16/2020 12:02:00 PM

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In #24 JCM said: This went done two blocks from my morning walk on the trail, while on was walking.

Wow.  Too close to home.

To ask the question that is literally, uh, begging... itself... to be asked: On your morning walk, do you "carry"? 

JCM 7/16/2020 12:13:22 PM

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Reply to Occasional Reader in 26:

I haven't been. But that's gonna' change.

It's just a walk on the local bike / walking path. Since the gym is closed I walk, my knees too torn up to jog.

The City doesn't tolerated the homeless so they stay down in Seattle and the crime rate is low, package thieves, car prowls the like.

The guy stabbed might even be one of the regulars I say morning to when we pass.

But too damn close to home and my walking route.

Occasional Reader 7/16/2020 12:29:43 PM

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Reply to JCM in 27:

I do a lot of walking, too.  And as soon as I get my CCW, yeah, I'll be carrying, particularly for night walks.

lucius septimius 7/16/2020 2:45:02 PM

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Kosh's Shadow 7/16/2020 4:08:33 PM

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Reply to lucius septimius in 29:

Reminds me of how people from Mass. go to New Hampshire to buy fireworks (and tax-free liquor and cigarettes)

I had relatives that would go to NH years ago to stock up on cartons of smokes. Long enough ago that they complained when a carton (10, 12?) went up to $2