Unrest grows, at home and abroad

Walt has been quiet for the last couple of days, waiting for other shoes to drop in the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and the Excited States of America. Here's the recap. 

The presidential election in the Philippines turned out as Walt predicted. (Lifetime pct .992) Bongbong, aka Ferdinand Marcos Jr., son of the late Philippines dictator of the same name, is riding on a tsunami of votes. 

He has 30 million so far, more than double the total of his rival, the current Vice-President, Maria Leonra "Leni" Robredo. 

36 years after protesters drove his dad out of office, Bongbong will become Pinas' latest "strongman president". Ms Robredo, predicts that his election will sanctify and perpetuate the abuses of his father.

Against all such criticism, in Marcos strongholds in Bisayas (the nicest part of PI, IMHO), the historic family name holds an almost messianic appeal over impressionable and celebrity-struck people who don't know or don't believe the tales of corruption and dictatorship that marked his father's 21-year rule.

In the province of Leyte, ancestral home of his 92-year-old mother Imelda of the 1000 Shoes, the junior Marcos is seen as a man of the people, even though he's lived a life of wealth and privilege few Pinoys can imagine. Such is the power of political family names, like "Kennedy" and "Clinton" and [Next item please. Ed.]    

In another poor country which seems to be sliding from third-world status to fourth-world, Sri Lanka, mostly peaceful protests against leftist misrule have turned violent.

Walt has lost touch with his agents in Colombo and Kandy [Are you there? Send word! Ed.] but understands that a curfew is now in force across the country after mobs burned down homes belonging to the ruling Rajapaksa family and their cronies (such as government minister Sananth Nishantha, whose blazing house is shown below) amid mounting anger at the economic crisis. 

Last night's violence capped a day of unrest that saw Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa quit, but this failed to bring calm. Crowds besieged his residence, from which he was evacuated in a pre-dawn operation amid tear gas and warning shots. 

Protests are continuing despite the curfew. Seven people have died and over 200 have been injured so far this week. The island-wide curfew has been extended until Wednesday morning as authorities seek to quell the violence.

Back in the USA, although Antifa and other woke, pro-abortion terrorists have mounted "mostly peaceful protests" in such leftist strongholds as Seattle and Portland OR, their efforts to fire up the citizenry [No more puns please. Ed.] haven't held a candle [Watch it! Ed.] to those of the righteously angry demonstrators in Sri Lanka. 

Public opinion polls measuring the reaction to the leaked draft of the SCOTUS decision in the Hobbs case, suggest that the majority of Americans won't support attempts by Democrats and other liberals and leftists to codify "women's reproductive health rights", i.e. the right to kill babies if having them is inconvenient.

Meanwhile, Walt awaits news -- any news at all -- about the Marshal of the Supreme Court's supposed efforts to find and prosecute the source of the leak. Let me name names once again. Reports all over the Net identify Justice Sonia Maria Sotomayor and/or her clerk, Amit Jane, as the source of the leak. Has the Marshal interviewed either of them? We should be told!

Further reading: "The Real Threat is the Violent Left-wing", by Jeff Crouere, Townhall, 9/5/22. 

"Pandemics, race riots are part of the price we pay for having big cities"

The headline is adapted from a line in "The City is Killing America: America's real problem are urban problems", by Daniel Greenfield, in Frontpage Mag, 21/10/20. Mr Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

In this lengthy and thoughtful article, Mr Greenfield traces the rise of American cities, and their problems, from the early days through the Civil War and the industrial age into the urban decay and despair which blight the once-great cities of todays Disunited States.

He concludes that cities like New York and San Francisco, not to mention Seattle and Portland -- all of them run by Democrats -- are the breeding grounds and incubators for pandemics (Covid-19 is just one) and "mostly peaceful protests" (read: race riots) which are destroying America, literally.

The photos above were taken in Seattle in June. 46 more can be found in "Seattle Riot: 46 devastating photos of Downtown destruction, vandalism", a photo gallery posted on mynorthwest.com, 1/6/20. By why pick on Seattle? Google images for Chicago, Buffalo, Newark, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Boston or virtually any US city, especially those on the "blue coasts".

And then there's Detroit. You may remember seeing "Quiz: Which American city has been occupied 3 times by the US Army?" on WWW 3/12/19. Walt shared a positive review of Detroit: An American Autopsy, by Charlie LeDuff, Penguin Press, 2013, along with just two of the excellent photos to be found in an excellent photo essay at the end of that book. It's depressing but compelling reading.

Mr Greenfield writes: Pandemic maps of the death toll show the deaths concentrating around major cities before making the slow trek from urban into suburban and eventually rural areas. The urban lockdowns didn’t stop the spread of the virus. What they really did was trap poor and middle class residents in urban areas, while the wealthy fled, and the virus spread to urbanites with the least mobility.

The people with the worst immune systems, in the densest living conditions, and the least ability to get up and leave, suffered the most, from nursing home patients to minorities with large families. The general pattern was historically familiar from the Middle Ages, and the only thing that our public health experts proved is that they weren’t any smarter than medieval peasants.

But the coronavirus is an urban problem and all the official solutions to it are urban solutions. And the urban problems and their solutions are killing us and taking down the whole country.

Urbanization has become a pyramid scheme taking over entire states, while hollowing out the more conservative rural areas, turning red states blue, and leaving everyone except those at the top of the pyramid scheme poorer with each generation.

America is no longer divided between the old geographies of North and South, but the new geographies of density, between cities and their suburbs, and rural areas and small towns. The latter represent the old American communities, while the former showcase the new feudal order in which great suburban wealth and urban poverty combine into radical political alignment. 

That’s the so-called “resistance”, not by the disempowered, but by the politically privileged....

The urban model hasn’t worked for America in sixty years. The pandemic has put it on the verge of collapse as the wealthy industries that made cities their base flee into virtual workspaces. It’s time to rethink and defund cities as the hubs of our economy and our nation....

Envisioning a less dense and more open country will heal many of our social and economic ills. Urban areas have concentrated political radicalism and blight. Universities have become their own radical cities. Municipalities have built networks of crony companies around themselves. Density has destroyed communities and families while depriving people of a meaningful life.

Reducing immigration can slow down population growth to sustainably match our economy and replacing cities with communities can allow our society to heal from its urban wounds. America was built around communities, not cities. It can be rebuilt around communities again.

The city is too big to fail and that means that the country is dying of its failures. We can either keep the city alive at the cost of the country, or let the city fail so that the country can live.

Walt regrets that limitations of space keep us from sharing the whole article. Please, dear readers, click on the link at top or here to read the whole thing.

Poor Len Canayen: the year the flu cancelled the Stanley Cup

Ed. here. With the National Hockey League forced to "pause" its season -- in the words of (((Gary Bettman))) -- and probably the playoffs too, we didn't expect our National Sports Editor, Poor Len Canayen, to contribute anything until whenever play resumes, probably in the fall. But here he is, with a timely story about the year the Stanley Cup was not awarded.

Today, April 5th, A.D. 2020, is the 101st anniversary of the death of Joe Hall. [Who he? Ed.] Tanks, Hed., for asking. Joe Hall played for the 1918-19 edition of Canada's team, the Montréal Canadiens. That season, only the second for the NHL (founded in 1917), the Habs had finished at the top of the standings, and in March of 1919 went to Seattle to play the Seattle Metropolitans, of the Pacific Coast Hockey Association, for the Stanley Cup.

The bleu-blanc-et-rouge were looking for revenge. They had won Lord Stanley's silverware, emblematic of North American (and therefore world) hockey supremacy, in 1916, defeating the Portland OR Rosebuds. (Seriously. That was the team's name.) But the Metropolitans thrashed the Canadiens the following year, bringing the trophy back to the west coast.

In 1918 the Toronto Arenas (or Blueshirts, depending on whose history you read) defeated the Vancouver Millionaires, [Where did they get these names? Ed.] in a series held in Toronto. This was back in the daze when transcontinental travel was a big deal, so the series alternated between the east and west, which meant that Seattle would be the venue for the 1919 rematch between the Metropolitans (no-one had dubbed them them "Mets") and the Canadiens.

Unfortunately, the "Spanish flu" got to Seattle before the Habs did. The epidemic is thought to have started at Camp Funston, in Kansas, in March 1918. From there it went with American doughboys to Europe, where it mutated in the trenches of the Great War, and spread around the world. The name "Spanish influenza" resulted from Spain's neutrality during WWI, which meant that Spanish newspapers, unlike those of the belligerent nations, did not censor news of the devastation caused by the disease.

The Spanish flu came back to North America wih wounded soldiers in the summer of 1918, and spread quickly and with deadly effect across the major cities of the USA and Canada. About 8500 Chicagoans died in September and October. In New York City, 851 people died in a single day. In Toronto, more than 1600 people died in the last three weeks of October. Montréal reported over 16,000 cases in that same month. In the East, the disease seemed to disappear by December of 2018, but in the West, Seattle suffered through its worst month of the epidemic.

The Canadiens arrived in Seattle on 18 March 1919. That spring's series had all the makings of a classic, but turned into a tragedy. Five games were hotly contested, with Seattle thrashing the Habs in games 1 and 3. Montréal prevailed in game 2. Game 4 was an epic, ending, after two 10-minute overtime periods, in a scoreless tie! Game 5 also went into overtime, with la Sainte Flannelle coming out on top.

So as April Fool's Day of 2019 dawned, the two te4ams were even, with two wins apiece and the 0-0 tie. A victory for either team in Game 6 would mean the Stanley Cup. Both teams appeared to be tiring, but it wasn't fatigue. It was the Spanish flu. On the morning of April 1st, George Kennedy, the Canadiens' owner/manager, and three players were confined to their hotel. Joe Hall and a teammate had fevers of 104 degrees and were taken to Providence Hospital.

The game that night was cancelled. There was some talk that Game 6 might be played later, perhaps in Vancouver BC, which had not been so hard hit, once the players recovered. But it was not to be. Joe Hall died in Sattle's Columbus Sanitarium on April 5th. Two teammates and the owner died later. No winner for 1919 was ever declared.

Footnote: More than half a century after the NHL started expanding in 1967, Seattle will finally get a team in the Big League, starting in the 2021-22 season, if such event ever eventuates. The name of the new franchise is as yet unknown, but it probably won't be the Metropolitans... or the Rosebuds.

Another footnote: For a long time it looked as if there couldn't possibly be another season in which there would be no Stanley Cup champion. Then along came Mr Bitchman, on whose watch the NHL saw the entire 2004-5 season cancelled. If the Cup is not awarded this year, as seems likely, it won't be his fault... this time... just the flu... again. But take heart, hockey fans. Hockey survived, the NHL survived, the Montréal Canadiens not only survived, but came back stronger than ever!

Signs of life seen in Seattle

From the other side of the world, Agent 29 sends us something à propos, put together by the Little Old Signmaker at Seattle Propane, which you'll find at Wallingford Chevron. Big smile, everyone!

Easter eggless in Seattle

Another report of political correctness carried to absurdity, this time from Seattle. A teen volunteering in a Grade 3 classroom says she wanted to put treats together for the children for Easter, but was told she'd have to call the eggs "spring spheres."

The girl, Jessica, told KIRO Radio, "At the end of the week, I had an idea that I wanted to fill a little plastic egg with treats and jelly beans and other candy." She said the Easter eggs were meant as a parting gift to the kisd after she finished her volunteer assignment.

"I was kind of unsure how the teacher would feel about that," Jessica said, adding there were different cultures at the school and she wanted to clear it first. The teacher asked administration.

Jessica said she was told "I could do it as long as I called the treat 'spring spheres... not Easter eggs." Jessica said she thought it was "ridiculous" but she still passed out the eggs to the students.

Seattle Schools issued a statement on its website saying they "have a religion and religious accommodation policy, approved in 1983, stating that 'no religious belief or non-belief should be promoted by the school district or its employees, and none should be disparaged.'"

To think that using the term "Easter eggs" disparages someone else's religion [Who? Muslims? Ed.]... Now, that's ridiculous.