Thursday's Place: The Cleveland Museum of Art

 I have grown fatigued with people who:

1.  Think surfing is a weird thing for a man in his 60's to do
2.  Are snobs about going on a sea cruise
3.  Don't like Wagnerian opera
4.  Can't change a tire
5.  Think Cleveland, Ohio is some hideous backwater that is well beneath their sense of self

In response, those people:

1.  Don't know how to swim
2.  Don't know how to swim and are afraid of water
3.  Don't understand German; don't understand opera; don't understand the liminal desires of the soul
4.  Are seriously maladroit
5.  Are puzzlewits

Not only may one find in Cleveland the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, three professional sports teams, a world-class medical research facility, and a variety of ethnic neighborhoods that represent the cultural transformation of the United States through history, but there is, in particular, a pleasantly green crescent named University Circle that contains:

Severance Hall [the home of the Cleveland Orchestra, rated one of the best, sometime the best, in the world],
The Cleveland Botanical Gardens
The Crawford Auto Museum
The Cleveland Institute of Art
Case Western Reserve University
The Cleveland Institute of Music
The Museum of Contemporary Art
The Cleveland Museum of Natural History
Murray Hill, Cleveland's Little Italy
and, the jewel in the crown, The Cleveland Museum of Art.

Since childhood, and since the death of my parents and the dissemination of our family throughout the U.S. world, the CMA is still my reason for going back home as often as I can.

One of the historical benefits of Northeastern Ohio is that it encouraged a considerable number of wealthy people in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to multiply their wealth and re-invest it into the community.  That's why, even in the midst of daunting unemployment and poverty, there are still these cultural pockets of wonder.

[To see what it looks like for an area to create wealth for a few who leave nothing behind, check out western Pennsylvania.]

While some of the robber barons who lived in Cleveland are well-known in history, John D. Rockefeller being the best-known, the CMA owes its genesis to three lesser-known, but certainly generous, industrialists named Hinman Hurlbut, John Huntington, and Horace Kelley.  By pooling their considerable resources, and by accepting the donation of the estate of a Jeptha Wade [he founded Western Union], a 75 acre "green space" was completed in 1916 with the CMA serving as its centerpiece.

Expansion #1

#2

#3

My reflections are more personal, however.  It is the first museum that I ever remember visiting, back when it was still in its original incarnation looking like an impressive, private mansion.  While I found the rooms filled with antique furniture to be musty and dull, it was the collection of Medieval armor, particularly that of Richard the Lion-Hearted, that captured my lively imaginings.

[An aside:  So complete is the CMA's armor collection that Hollywood designers and prop managers will visit and meet with the curators so that what's represented in their films is authentic.]

Before I was out of elementary school, the museum expanded; and would again before I was out of high school.  Another ambitious expansion was completed in the last decade, with the collections now rivaling those of the other great museums of the world.  The disparate buildings were thus joined under a massive atrium, granting the museum a large, indoor space for innovative art and performances.  Currently, the CMA has a collection disseminated through separate departments for

Chinese Art,
Modern European Art,
African Art, Drawings, Prints,
European Art, Textiles and Islamic Art,
American Painting and Sculpture,
Greek and Roman Art,
Contemporary Art,
Medieval Art,
Decorative Art and Design,
Pre-Columbian and Native North American Art,
Japanese and Korean Art,
Indian and Southeast Asian Art,
and Photography

The permanent collection boasts these highlights:

The Crucifixion of Saint Andrew, Caravaggio, 1607

The Race Track (Death on a Pale Horse), by Albert Pinkham Ryder

The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, by J. M. W. Turner, 1834-35

A Hare and a Leg of Lamb, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, 1742

The Red Kerchief Portrait of Madame Monet, by Claude Monet

Pablo Picasso's Blue Period piece, La Vie (1903)

Walker Evans, Allie Mae Burroughs, Wife of a Cotton Sharecropper, Hale County, Alabama, 1936.

George Bellows, Stag at Sharkey's, 1909.

One of my favorite pieces is Rodin's The Thinker, posing outside the main entrance.  A sharp-eyed reader will notice the portions of his legs are missing.  Is that an indulgence of artistic vision?  No, some nutter in 1970 planted a bomb underneath it.  The nutter was never caught.

I should add that the aforementioned Asian collections are larger and finer than those found in NYC.  But, that would be bragging, so I'll simply whisper it to you.

During one trip back in the 1990's, I discovered the portrait of a rather common young man of the early 18th century.  I'd never paid much attention to it, but now it rattled my imagination as I realized that I was at the time living in the house in Connecticut that the young man had built.  Remarkable, isn't it?

However, the one feature that was emphasized by the founders and has been repeatedly, through all of the changes advanced through the last century, maintained by the current director and staff, is the best part of all:

The Cleveland Museum of Art is free.  Admission to the permanent collection is $0.00; it always has been and always will be.  Art, after all, belongs to the people; all of the people.

And that is a proud legacy that's worth some patronage.  Say what you will about the city of Cleveland, but I can't think of museum anywhere in the world that can boast of that particular feature.

Wow, They're Really Serious about Gun Control This Time

Democrats this week approved legislation to require background checks for essentially all sales and transfers of firearms -- but rejected GOP-led efforts to amend the legislation to alert law enforcement authorities when gun buyers, including illegal immigrants, fail those background checks.

Look, I'm feeling ornery these days and will note that, in my role as a half-breed hillbilly who works undercover as an East Coast, liberal, Caucasian, intellectual snob, all of the talk about guns is really just old-fashioned class snobbery.  "Those icky people and their icky guns; I've seen them in movies" is really the impetus behind much of the political talk about gun control.

A glaring example that no one admits is that none of the onerous gun control measures implemented in Connecticut in the wake of the Sandy Hook killings would have prevented that lunatic from killing people.  It is all just another episode in the kabuki theater of contemporary politics.

Yeah

The ocean is made up of tiny drops of water. Even so, life is but an endless series of little details, actions, speeches, and thoughts. And the consequences whether good or bad of even the least of them are far-reaching. - Sivananda

As Politicians and Media Balkanize Us, This is Becoming More Common

Three Men Attacked On Their Way to Synagogue, As Renewed Spate of Assaults Targets Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn

Don’t worry, NYC. Your mayor is ON IT.  Well, if “it” is a corndog in Iowa.

Dichotomy Alert

Buses are okay; science not so much

Hang on, the same people who want me to embrace every random doom and gloom environmental theory because "it's science" are also against the construction of a telescope, a tool of real science, because of some antique superstitions?

The people who tell me that they don't practice "organized religion" are suddenly deeply concerned about a religion that no one practices?

A sea of Hawaiian flags billowed through Kaahumanu Avenue Saturday morning as a few thousand Maui residents marched in solidarity with the ongoing protest against the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope on Mauna Kea.

I'm not sure why people are marching in Maui; Mauna Kea is on the so-called "Big Island" of Hawaii.

Also, I've actually been to the top of Mauna Kea; it looks like Mars.  It is sacred only to giant centipedes.

If my religion is to be excised from common regard, if my prayers are disallowed from the public square, if the usefulness of all of the schools, hospitals, universities, and social ministries built by my religion are expected to submit to transient, secular authority, if my faith is to be mocked as the mere belief in an "invisible sky god", why is a tribal belief that was of no practical or lasting service, and has no active worshipers, suddenly able to override the needs of science?

And if it’s so danged sacred, why are there long-serving tourist buses going up and down those roads?

[I don't really care, of course.  To quote Baker Mayfield, I woke up this morning feeling dangerous.]

Besides, as this is in the Hawaiian Islands, the locals will be against anything that does not produce an exploitable collection of tourists.  The Canary Islands are more pleasant and prettier, anyway.  I never once watched the locals in the Canaries mock and abuse a gibbering loon in the town square like I did in Lahaina.  In fact, the homeless problem in all of Hawaii is rather severe, but, hey, don't put a telescope on top of that mountain.  It's, like, sacred or something.

It's a pity human dignity isn't as sacred, isn't it?

Not to Be a Cynic, But Lies are the First Language of Politics

On Friday afternoon, two of the leading contenders in the Democratic presidential primary lied. There’s no other fair way to put it. They flat-out spread fiction, libeled an innocent man, and stoked American divisions — all for political gain.

Those of both parties work solely for political gain.  That's hardly news.  I appreciate we are told that they are working for us, or "for the children",  but there is little evidence of that.  Mostly, they work to garner more power for themselves and create more opportunities for graft.

It's delightfully post-Christian of them.

Which Makes It Even More Puzzling That People Want to Give the Government More and More Power Over Their Lives

Jeffrey Epstein’s Death in Federal Custody, the Suicide of Federal Government Credibility

Our Post-Christian Reality

Emil Durkheim’s 1897 diagnosis of “anomic suicide” describes the Columbine perpetrators as well as the 2016 San Bernardino attack by Muslim fanatics, the “right-wing” shooter in El Paso and the “left-wing” shooter in Dayton. They are individuals cut off from society, destabilized by change and despairing of their own place in the world. Such monsters always have been among us. But now we are cultivating such monsters by destroying the ties that bind us to each other, to our past and to our future. 

Everyone used to matter. No-one matters anymore, not at least in the postmodern dystopia of invented identity. In the good old days we mattered because each of us was radically unique. We were unique as members of a congregation standing before the God who made us, and unique as parents watching over the children we had brought into the world. We knew that each of us had a singular purpose, first because God does nothing in vain. We hoped to make the previous generation proud of us, and the next generation worthy of its predecessors. Each of us had a mission that no-one else could carry out for us, and that mission was to raise children who were uniquely ours, and with whom we had a unique rapport through bonds of intimacy that no master’s degree in psychology could replace.

"Common Sense" Gun Control and the Address of Mental Illness are Not Mutually Exclusive

Mental illness and mass murder 

To acknowledge the role of mental disturbance is not to take a position one way or the other about guns and gun control. As I see it, mental disturbance is a key factor in driving people to kill en masse. Guns are the means most of these people are using to fulfill their deranged desire. 

If, consistent with the Constitution, there are ways to reduce the ability of potential shooters to obtain firearms, we should implement them. If, consistent with the Constitution, there are ways to identify and treat mentally disturbed potential shooters before they kill, we should implement them.

Now, That's a Correction

If you don't subscribe to The Washington Post and have used up your free articles for this month, this is unfortunately behind their paywall [hey, that rowboat of the newspaper's owner pictured below, the S.S. Virtue Signal, doesn't pay for itself].  However, let me make this short; certainly shorter than the correction itself.

A free-lancer, who often writes about how food criticism is a bastion of "white privilege" [Told ya!], wrote an article a few weeks ago about black families in the south attempting to hold onto their generational farmland.

It turns out the article was accepted without anyone actually checking its details.  You know, like an editor.  I thought they still had those at newspapers.

So, The Post wrote a correction, and it's a doozy. In fact, it's almost 600 words long.

A previous version of this article contained many errors and omitted context and allegations important to understanding two families stories,” the correction reads. Among them: Wilson’s article misspelled the first name of a source’s grandfather, credited him with the wrong number of children with his second wife, misstated the number of acres sold in a partition sale, misquoted a source, “omitted key details that affect understanding of ownership of the land....

It was a touching story, but in the era formed by Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair, not to mention The Post's own Janet Cooke, one would expect them to be a tad more cautious as to what goes to print, even if it's just to check not fabrications, but accuracy.

Rocky Colavito

"You can't tell how much spirit a team has until it's losing."

If you have never done so, at least once before you die buy yourself some "fan gear" for your favorite team [if you don't have a favorite team, at least borrow one for a day or two] and go to a baseball game.  Even if it's just a hat or a t-shirt, wear it with pride and notice how you are in the midst of a great number of people who are doing the same.  Seriously, put down The New York Times, turn off NPR, and enjoy a less precious existence for a few hours.  It's almost as restorative as a good liturgy.

It was something I learned from my grandfather, who came to the United States from Scotland after being laid off from the Clydebank shipyards.  Goodyear Tire and Rubber was hiring foreigners, so off he went, intending on staying in the U.S. until he could be re-hired back in the home land.  After living a short time in this new country, he realized its superior potential for advancement, gloried in its absence of a rigid class structure, and personally celebrated its encouragement of innovation.  So much so that, rather than return, he sent for his wife and daughter to join him in this new adventure. He was 40-years-old and should have been settled in his ways; I cannot tell you how glad I am that he resisted that convention.

There was only one problem, though: European football was not played in the U.S.  Since generations of my family have lived and died along with the fortunes of the Glasgow Celtic Football Club [aka one-half of "The Old Firm"; aka "The Bhoys"; aka "The Hoops"], he needed to find a replacement. Its unlikely source was baseball.  Specifically, the Cleveland Indians.

From the 1930's through the late 1950's there was a train that ran directly by the stadium so that Gramps and his "mates" [they were all Scottish immigrants] could attend games.  Around the time the train stopped running, he had a grandson with whom he could share this transplanted love and a son-in-law who could drive him [like many of the immigrant class of his generation, Gramps never bothered to learn how to drive], and so it was that I was introduced to that cathedral of Doubleday that sat on the shores of Lake Erie.

I attended my first professional game here; I plan on attending my last game at its replacement.  I don't remember much about the game itself as much as I recall the sheer theater that was the crowd, but there was one name that I kept hearing over and over again from the loudspeaker, from the fans around us, and from Gramps.  A musical name, rendered even more so in the manner in which it was pronounced in a Glaswegian accent:  Rocky Colavito.  Without question, he was the best the Indians had to offer and the one with whom the hopes and dreams of the city rested.

I imagine every team in baseball, a sport that is rife with superstition, has its version of the Red Sox's "Curse of the Bambino".  For those who don't know what I reference, in 1919 the Boston Red Sox traded Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees, a supernatural folly that ensured that Boston would not win the World Series until 2004.

Cleveland, too, had its curse and, as with Boston, it involved a very ill-conceived trade.  Rocky Colavito was not only a talented right fielder and formidable hitter, but his personality was well-fitted to that of the working class Clevelanders who came to watch his art.  As the Indians were perennial losers, often with the most mediocre of players, Colavito stood out not only for his talent, but for his positive attitude.  He would even stay in the stadium to sign autographs, even if those seeking them numbered in the hundreds.  There were those in the corridors of power who were seriously talking about having him stand for mayor upon his retirement from baseball.

And then, in 1960, he was summarily traded to the Detroit Tigers.  I know!  What?!  Not only were the Indians robbed of their best player, the people of Detroit really didn't like Rocky and attacked him in their sports pages on a daily basis.  For this, the gods of baseball ordained that Cleveland would never know anything other than frustration in their quest for the sport's holy grail.

This remained true when the new manager of the Indians decided, at great cost to the starting line-up, to bring Colavito back to Cleveland in 1965.  His return was greeted as something akin to Mohammed's return to Mecca.  In thanksgiving to his favorite city, he made the All-Star team in 1965 and 1966 and placed fifth in the 1965 MVP vote with 108 RBI and 93 walks, a league record that year, finishing in the top five in home runs, hits and runs.  The Indians still didn't get close to the World Series, but what the heck; Rocky was back in town.

Unfortunately, my grandfather had died the year before and we weren't able to share in the great return [he died peacefully right after watching an Indians/Tigers game on television; the Indians had lost, of course], although in his spirit I have made sure that a trip to a ball field with my step-son and sister's kids is required periodically.  I always buy them a pin and/or cap.

Colavito would retire from playing and become a coach for the Indians and, later, the Kansas City Royals.  In a moment that was found embarrassing in Kansas City but admirable in Cleveland, he would make the news again in 1982 when, after being clobbered in his car by a drunk driver, he would be arrested for assaulting a couple of police officers who were a little too lippy with him as he was administering "street justice" to the offending motorist.  [I'm the first to admit that my hometown has a fluid and feisty ethical sense.]

The next year I recall idly watching a Yankees/Royals game on television [I was living in NYC at the time] when I saw a bench-clearing fracas over an argument about the amount of pine tar that was used on a bat.  In the middle of the action, I recognized a familiar face arguing with an umpire so successfully that he was ejected from the game.  Regardless of the circumstances, it was always nice to see Rocky on a ball field.

While he played or otherwise worked for many teams during his career, Colavito has had three books written about his influence on Cleveland and its team, is a member of the Indians' Hall of Fame, and was voted "most memorable personality" in the history of Cleveland baseball.  Still active into his 80's, he blew out the candles on his birthday cake before a full stadium in Cleveland just last year.

Back in the days when there was little to cheer about with our hometown team, it was always heartening to watch a player who cared as much about spirit as victory and brought passion to every inning of every game.  It is on such small and humble things that memories are built, and those I cherish with greater devotion as my years increase.

Thursday's Place: Caffe Trieste

It's not a very prepossessing place, although the places featured on Thursdays rarely are.  That lack of pretension is probably what made or makes them popular, as they attract a crowd that doesn't want the surroundings to distract from their own affectations.  Also, they tended to be cheap, like those whom they attracted.  Since I primarily write of places that were popular with the creative class, that's no surprise.

In the 1950's, the North Beach neighborhood in San Francisco was an enclave of Italian immigrants filled with culturally specific restaurants and groceries familiar to anyone who has ever grown up in an ethnic neighborhood.  As with a dynamic that we have noted before with the Coventry Road section of Cleveland, North Beach began to attract a more bohemian crowd who found the relaxed atmosphere and low rents to be desirable.

This was aided somewhat when the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti opened a small bookstore in the neighborhood where one could find inventory not to be found in other stores.  As the genre of literature he promoted became dominant, and as he also opened a small publishing press for those who could not find support in the mainstream industry, the City Lights Bookstore became the magnet for those who would transform the Italian neighborhood to that of the counter-culture.

Looking every bit the Frisco poet

In the midst of it all, opened in 1956, was the Caffe Trieste.  Its owner, Giovanni Giotta, missed the real espresso and cappuccino of his hometown in Italy and opened the only place outside of New York's Little Italy where one could find the real thing.

[A note for those younger than I: In the days before ubiquitous, boutique coffee shops, espresso was basically mud in a cup and cappuccino was mud topped by a blast from a can of Reddi-Wip.  No, I'm not kidding.]

As both City Lights and Caffe Trieste opened around the same time, a trip to North Beach could include both on the itinerary and the coffeehouse offered the perfect place to read some volume purchased from Ferlinghetti.  Shortly afterwards, it would become a perfect place to write something to be published by Ferlinghetti.

Hence, one could order a proper espresso in the Caffe and be surrounded by habitues such as Alan Watts, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Richard Brautigan, Bob Kaufman, Gregory Corso, Michael McClure, and Kenneth Rexroth.  Lawrence Ferlinghetti, now 100, still frequents that large, copper cappuccino steamer.  Paul Kantner, one of the founders of Jefferson Airplane and creator of the "San Francisco sound" in rock music, made it his home away from home; and Francis Ford Coppola wrote the draft of the screenplay for The Godfather in a quiet corner.  Well, not so quiet when he was there, as he wrote with a portable, manual typewriter.

Giotti, commonly addressed as "Papa Gianni", would preside over his small, corner business for sixty years, surrendering his mortality at the age of 96 in 2016.  In addition to brewing the first, and still authentic, cup of cappuccino on the West Coast, Giotti was also an amateur musician who would share that talent with anyone who would come through his door.

From his obituary:

By the early 1970s, more than a dozen coffee shops dotted North Beach, but none was as musical as Caffe Trieste. Gianni and his son Gianfranco began performing for the cafe on Thursday mornings in 1970. The concerts grew so popular they were switched to Saturday afternoons.Mr. Giotta, who had studied opera in Trieste in his early 20s, would be joined onstage by Gianfranco, a semiprofessional singer, and Mr. Giotta’s wife, Ida; his other son, Fabio, would sing and accompany on accordion. The family would perform solos, duets and full choruses, primarily from Italian and French operas. Favorites were “Chella Lla,” “Figaro,” “Katerine” and “Funiculi, Funicula.” Professional singers visiting San Francisco began to stop in.

While Giotta would open other branches of Caffe Trieste in other areas of northern California as his success grew, the original was the only one that maintained that neighborhood cache and, as it turned out, the only one to survive his family's legal battles over his will.  After a few months of concern that this literary and artistic landmark would close, it was saved when cooler heads prevailed.

While North Beach is no longer the artistic cauldron it once was, and San Francisco currently is working through some traveler-unfriendly realities, one may still enjoy an honest cup, gaze upon the collected photographs of those who made the culture of the American Century, and marvel at what it is to be in the right place and the right time and reap the rewards of hospitable service to one's neighbors.

Moral Lectures in the Post-Christian Age

The Washington Post demands that you refrain from eating meat for the rest of your life so that your conspicuous consumption will not DESTROY the planet, or else the government may come forth to coerce you.

Meanwhile, this is the humble dinghy that the owner of The Washington Post just built for himself.  Not conspicuous at all, is it?

It's rather like the late Roman Empire in that an elite class creates and demands fealty to a shifting set of laws that they have no intention of following themselves.

Once again, I'll believe this to be an emergency when those who tell me it's an emergency begin to act like it.

Meet the Mother of Privilege

I notice that a leitmotif in the coming election cycle, that opportunity that politicians give us every few years to feel guilty and miserable about living our lives as independent, free-thinking, moral agents, is going to be this business about "privilege".

It's already getting turbo-charged in the Episcopal Church and, at some point, I'm going to have to sit in a room for hours with a fatuous expression on my face while someone with more power, income, and influence than I explains my privilege to me.

So, here are two things worth reading.  The first is about the remarkably privileged, wealthy, connected, and supernaturally Caucasian woman who began this business, and a second about how it corresponds with the Neo-Marxist overtones in our social discourse.

The Origins of “Privilege”

and

Privilege movement is racism on steroids

Really Bad "Woke" Ad Campaign > Millennials

Millennials are killing the razor industry with their trendy beards 

Oh, please.  My generation, you know, it included the ones who went to Woodstock and about whom the musical "Hair" was composed, had beards just as lush and the industry grew.  "Blame the Millennials" is a stupid game to play.

Could the cause not be ridiculously over-priced razors?  Or, as likely, an ad campaign that scolds about social issues so that the CEO of Proctor and Gamble and his exec staff can show off their coolness to the Wokestapo?

Why Gillette's New Ad Campaign Is Toxic

Generational blaming, like blaming that is based on gender and race and the rest of it, divides us and creates a poisonous reality in our society.  Just sell your dang razors at a reasonable price, lay off the lectures, and stop blaming the kids.  Your market share will grow.

Ohio. Michigan. Whatever.

Biden offers sympathy for the ‘tragic events in Houston today and also in Michigan’

Also, Houston?  Ah, close enough.

Oh, look. None of them know Ohio:
Trump mistakenly refers to shooting in Toledo

Click to Enlarge

The True Face of "Green"

An electric car being recharged at an electric station that is powered by...a diesel generator

This feeds the suspicion that electric vehicles are really designed to display the virtue of their owners rather than offer any real address to global cooling warming climate change disruption.

Some Stray Observations on Our Societal Reality

People smarter than I are beginning to notice that many mass shooting incidents [i.e. murders] are of a different nature in our social media-driven world than has been the case with those incidents in the past.  I've begun tracking some of the commonalities among the perpetrators and have stumbled over an interesting phenomenon.  [Note, I hold a degree in philosophy, so I preface everything with "I might be wrong".]

There seem to be three different types of mass shootings/bombings/lethal attacks:

1.  Terrorism, of which we are all familiar, that generally results in the death/suicide of the terrorist.  [September 11th, etc.]

2.  Genuine exercises in explosive, psychotic madness that generally result in the death/suicide of the perpetrator.  [Sandy Hook Elementary, etc.]

3.  A toxic form of narcissism revealed in an overwhelming desire to manipulate others through mass media; this generally ends when the perpetrator surrenders to authorities.  [El Paso, etc.]

It's #3 that has caught my attention, as it is driven by social media attention and the thrill of being able to manipulate mass media into a raging apoplexy.

For example, the shooter at the mosque in New Zealand, another in Norway, and the shooter in El Paso all posted a "manifesto" online shortly before committing their respective atrocities.  [There is a medium for these, named 8Chan, that traffics in such.]  The manifesto was gibberish, a collection of statements designed to trigger a reaction from the extremes of ideology.  The perpetrator then sits back and revels in his sense of power when he can successfully manipulate prominent politicians, media members, and even Hollywood simpletons to go after one another in the tiresome round of blame and shame that forms in the aftermath of the atrocity.  This is why it is important for the perpetrator to survive his killings.

Consider how many online media organizations do something similar these days.  For example, CNN recently posted on Twitter a link to a story about how "recent research" indicates that people prefer white robots to black robots.  Yes, that's right.  The story indicated that the "research" suggested that this was an example of racism.

There was a negative reaction online to the accusation of racism, followed by mocking from the CNN reporter about the "fragility" of the white people responding, followed by subsequent reaction to CNN's mocking, ad infinitum.

A story that in previous times would not have even been published, as it is so weakly sourced, is published not to present a form of truth or the report of an event, but to garner negative attention.  As the number of "clicks" that an article receives is the basis for ad revenue nowadays, this is probably a pretty successful plan.  Outrage becomes currency.

So, in a form of imitation, an 8Chan clown publishes an absurd manifesto in every social medium, commits murder, waits for his words to be discovered by mass media, then sits in his cell and sees his handiwork result in whole portions of our society, if not the world, blaming some other portion in rhetorical chaos.  For that type of personality, that of a marginal mediocrity, this must be an enviable high.

We've stumbled across a similar meditation:  Is This The Rise Of Joker Terrorism?
And here:  From El Paso to Antifa to LA: America the Insane
Also:  Network provider Cloudflare to drop 8chan after El Paso shooting

A text commonly referred to, and perhaps even read, by some of these shooters is The Great Replacement by Renaud Camus.  Viewing the book's synopsis will reveal this new, startling world view.  It seems mostly to be a reaction to the increasing emphasis on racial tribalization that is exploited by our political class in order for them to shore up their power and access to graft, yet makes common life for normal people to be more difficult.

Given some updated information, I think expecting schizophrenics voluntarily to submit to treatment is puzzle-witted and naive.

Dear Grandpa, Thanks for Leaving the U.K.

Oh, great.  Moral lectures from another collection of thick, priveleged puzzlewits:

‘Cry God for Harry, England, and Saint George.’ Ok, so we’ve come a long way since Shakespeare’s take on the Battle of Agincourt. But still, Cry God for Harry. Thank God we have our very own Prince Hal to instruct us in the evils of racism and lead us into the woke uplands. Having ditched the base contagious clouds of, erm, playing naked billiards in Las Vegas and dressing up as a Nazi, Harry is now out to educate us all on the problem of unconscious bias.

The Prince, as newly genned-up on racism as a students’ union officer recently graduated from Intersectionality 101, has decreed that ‘just as stigma is handed down from generation to generation, your perspective on the world and on life and on people is something that is taught to you. It’s learned from your family, learned from the older generation, or from advertising, from your environment.’ Bless him, Harry is clearly speaking from experience here. If anyone has a claim to have learned racism from his family it’s the 6th in line to the throne. But the rest of us? Not so much. It’s bad enough that we keep His Royal Highness in luxury without also having to endure his preaching...

There are heaps of reasons for people not just to criticise Meghan and Harry, but to ridicule their hypocrisy and puncture their pomposity. And not one involves the colour of Meghan’s skin. Meghan comes in for criticism because she is the worst kind of snob who condescends to tell others not just what to do, but also what to think. The fact that she is biracial is completely irrelevant. Of course, there is an obvious solution for Harry and Meghan if they do not like the public attention and criticism. Harry could denounce his claim to the throne. They could give up the titles, move out of the palaces and fund their own lifestyle. I can’t for the life of me imagine why they don’t.