Outside reports that the COVID epidemic had terrible consequences for the Lake Tahoe resort community:
They just kept coming. The day-trippers, Airbnbers, second-home owners, and unmasked revelers. Unleashed after California’s first statewide COVID-19 lockdown ended in late June of last year, they swarmed Lake Tahoe in numbers never before seen, even for a tourist region accustomed to the masses. “It was a full-blown takeover,” says Josh Lease, a tree specialist and longtime Tahoe local.
July Fourth fireworks were canceled, but that stopped no one. August was a continuation of what Lease called a “shit show.”
The standstill traffic was one thing; the locals were used to that. But the trash—strewn across the sand, floating along the shore, piled around dumpsters—was too much. Capri Sun straws, plastic water-bottle caps, busted flip-flops, empty beer cans. One day in early August, Lease picked up a dirty diaper on a south shore beach and dangled it before a crowd. “This anyone’s?” he asked.
Lease was pissed. He couldn’t believe the lack of respect people had for this beautiful area, his home for two decades. Plus, they’d invaded during a pandemic, bringing their COVID with them.
That day, after the diaper incident, Lease went back to his long-term rental in Meyers, California, a few miles south of the lake at the juncture of Highways 89 and 50, where he could see the endless stream of cars. An otherwise even-keeled guy, he logged on to Facebook and vented. “Let’s rally,” he posted on his page, adding that he wanted to put together a “non welcoming committee.” He was joking—sort of. But word spread like the wildfires that would soon rage uncontrollably around the state. Before long someone had designed a flyer of a kid wearing a gas mask, with a speech bubble that read “Stay Out of Tahoe.” It went viral.
On Friday, August 14, at four o’clock, over 100 locals from around the lake began to gather. They commandeered the roundabouts leading into the Tahoe Basin’s major towns—Truckee, Tahoe City, Kings Beach, and Meyers in California, and Incline Village in Nevada—to greet the weekend hordes. Young women in bikini tops, elderly couples in floppy hats, and bearded dads bouncing babies in Björns held up hand-painted signs: “Respect Tahoe Life,” “Your Entitlement Sucks!,” and “Go Back to the Bay.” One old-timer plastered his truck with a banner that read “Go Away” and drove around and around a traffic circle.
But summer turned to fall, which turned to winter, which became spring, and the newcomers are still here. It’s not just the tourists anymore, whose numbers have ebbed and flowed with lockdown restrictions and the weather and whose trash has gone from wet towels twisted in the sand to plastic sleds split in the snow. There’s another population of people who came and never left: those freed by COVID from cubicles and work commutes. They migrated, laptops in tow, to mountain towns all over the West, transforming them into modern-day boomtowns: “Zoom-towns.”
In Lake Tahoe, the unwelcoming party was hardly a deterrence. The outsiders have settled in.
A North Carolina man and woman were attacked by a bobcat in their driveway earlier this week, and things got real crazy, real fast. What starts off as a sleepy suburban morning becomes a chaotic scene, culminating in the man throwing the bobcat and yelling “I’LL SHOOT THE FUCKER!”
The day seems to start off innocuously enough, as the man and woman begin their morning by loading things into a Ford Explorer. To the side is a fabulous Ford Freestyle, a vehicle that never got its proper due despite being a wagon.
The man bids good morning to a runner and turns to the Explorer. He carries a tray of food and what looks like coffee, which he then sets down on the hood right after reminding himself that he needs to wash his car. I mean, coffee on the hood is a risky move already, but it pales in comparison to what’s next.
Our Law is based on the English Common Law, and the pertinent case is The King v. Hodgson, “a knave who feloniously and maliciously starts a ‘chain reaction’ of acts dangerous to human life must be held responsible for the natural fatal results of such acts.” — 1 Leach 7, 168 Eng. Rep. 105 (1730), which principle was upheld in Commonwealth v. Almeida. –362 Pa. 596, 68 A.2d 595 (1949), cert. denied, 339 U.S. 924 (1950).
Titus Andronicus: Ira Aldridge (1807-67) as Aaron the Moor.
David Cole brilliantly identifies the essence of the current racial problem in America: “The Curse of Aaron.”
If you ask a casual Shakespeare fan to name the Bard’s most villainous character, odds are the answer will be Richard III. And that’s not a bad response. Richard is indeed a murderous scoundrel. But the thing is, from the very first scene, Richard tells the audience exactly who he is, what he’s planning to do, and why.
There’s no mystery to Richard.
Now, Iago, on the other hand, presents a more complex puzzle. Why does Iago feel the need to destroy Othello? Well, throughout the course of the play, via his interactions with other characters and his soliloquies, Iago offers many possible reasons. Racial animus, professional envy, sexual jealousy. The audience is left with several possible motives to ponder.
But then we come to Aaron, the villainous Moor from Titus Andronicus. …
Whereas Iago is a white guy who torments a black, Aaron is a black guy who torments, well, everyone. He’s the lover and consigliere of Tamora, the Goth queen who marries the Roman Emperor Saturninus. Aaron is firmly in the catbird seat; he has the ear and affection of the empress, who dominates the weak and ineffectual emperor. Aaron’s got power, riches, and babes. And yet…he’s unsatisfied. Material success is not what matters to him. He despises the whites, foes and allies alike, and he’s driven by a compulsion to destroy their society. He arranges brutal rapes, horrific mutilations, and sadistic murders (he even tricks Titus into cutting off his own hand). He foments the unrest that will eventually bring down his own house. Aaron is, in the words of Titus’ brother Marcus, the “chief architect and plotter of these woes.”
Unlike in the case of Richard III, in which the audience is given a clear motive for the character’s villainy, and unlike in the case of Iago, in which the audience is given a choice of possible motives, Shakespeare never offers a glimpse into what makes Aaron tick. No monologue or soliloquy about wrongs done to him in the past or evils perpetrated by whites that made him the monster he is. Aaron is very defensive about his race; he defiantly throws it in the face of other characters. But throughout the course of the play, no one oppresses him because of his race. Indeed, his race does not hinder his estimable success.
You look at Aaron, living the high life—adviser and lover to the empress, a black man basking in luxury among whites…respected, feared, obeyed by those in power, and yet everything he does is geared toward punishing those who elevated him and destabilizing the society that allowed him to achieve influence—and you just want to say to the guy…what the fuck is your problem? You have it so good! Why the need to burn down the system and harm those around you?
Tamora asks that very question:
My lovely Aaron, wherefore look’st thou sad,
When every thing doth make a gleeful boast?
Aaron’s reply?
Vengeance is in my heart, death in my hand,
Blood and revenge are hammering in my head.
But why? Why the anger and hatred? By not answering that question, Shakespeare has inadvertently given us the most relevant 21st-century black character of any playwright in history. A character living in a society in which he is afforded all possible opportunities, while—even as he takes advantage of those opportunities—he harbors nothing but hostility toward the majority population, even if he can point to no specific reason why they deserve such enmity. His very identity is based upon hatred of whites. There’s no tidy origin story, no specific wrong that’s being avenged or injury that served as a catalyst for the rage. There’s just an angry black man who looks gift horses in the mouth and yanks their teeth for pleasure. A black man who finds more satisfaction in being at war than he does from achieving success.
A black man who feels entitled to that war, even if he cannot name a single concrete reason why he should be.
Behold the black New York Times and Washington Post and MSNBC journalists and the black Biden administration officials and the black Hollywood producers and the black athletes and academics who live lives that would make most people green with envy, yet who seem to find fulfillment only in antiwhite, anti-West rage.
Vengeance is in my heart, death in my hand,
Blood and revenge are hammering in my head.
If you could hear the innermost thoughts of someone like the NYT’s Nikole Hannah-Jones, that’s exactly what would be playing on a loop.
Meghan Markle is Aaron in a way that’s almost too on-the-nose. Accepted into a royal house, she proceeded to destroy it from within, in the name of a righteous anger based on nothing more than a belief that she’s racially entitled to be destructive. Presented with a life of luxury and influence, she found greater satisfaction in sowing discord. …
For the leftist blacks, whites, and Jews who view themselves as shepherds of the black community, Aaron is the ideal, the goal of all the social engineering and propagandizing. Perpetually furious, blindly hateful, vengeful though not for any wrongs actually incurred, unmollified by opportunity or success, and obsessively focused on “tearing it down” while having no idea what to replace “it” with.
GoodFruit.com pays tribute to the oldest domestic fruit tree in North America.
Hidden from view, down an embankment in an unremarkable business park north of Boston stands a very, very old pear tree.
The Endicott tree may be the oldest cultivated fruit tree in North America and is protected as a national landmark.
Historians estimate it was planted more than 380 years ago in the early 1630s. For reference, the Declaration of Independence was signed about 140 years later.
My hunt for this tree, which still produces pears, was exciting. I suppose I should have celebrated when I finally located the Endicott tree, but I didn’t.
Instead, I paused, stretched out on a grassy slope facing the diminutive tree and wondered how it survived centuries of encroachment by industry and suburbs.
In the early July sun, I could see a few small pears growing under a canopy held together by support wires and steel, surrounded by an iron fence that propped and protected the historic tree.
I was surprised how it appeared caged and suspended like an upside-down marionette, cornered in by a parking lot. The setting for this tree is in stark contrast to the grand old Bartlett “dinosaur” trees from my grandfather’s orchard in Washington state.
Many of my summer childhood days were spent climbing those giants, hiding in the canopy with binoculars looking for pirates and an occasional barn cat.
Though the Endicott tree was not what I expected, it was captivating. Every crag in the bark was deep, every pear nearly identical in size and shape, and it truly was a wonder to me that it was still producing.
It’s worth noting that the tree’s stubborn survival and historic significance has earned a spot for its genetic daughters to be propagated and protected at the National Clonal Germplasm Repository in Corvallis, Oregon.
I highly recommend anyone traveling near Danvers, Massachusetts, to seek out this tree.
Roger Simon comes up with the mot juste for our self-appointed social media moderators and fact checkers.
[H]ere is why Big Tech is the way it is, why its leaders—with the exception of Peter Thiel and a few others—so uniformly think the way they do.
They’re extremely bright (largely) guys who have reinvented the way we communicate and even live and made giant fortunes in the process. They used to be nerds, but now they’re big shots, inhabiting expensive homes in the most expensive place in America, Silicon Valley.
Given their history and the monomaniacal, focused manner in which they got there, I would wager many of them suffer from Asperger’s—“a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by significant difficulties in social interaction and nonverbal communication, along with restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior and interests.”
They get technology, they get business, but they don’t really get people. They don’t read widely, only within their world. Their machines have revealed the truth and they want to make sure the world follows their orders, which are, after all, politically correct.
When they censor they are doing what they are convinced is the right thing. They are what we may call Asperger’s Fascists.
The New York Post reports that Marxism and protest politics have paid off big for Patrisse Khan-Cullors.
As protests broke out across the country in the name of Black Lives Matter, the group’s co-founder went on a real estate-buying binge, snagging four high-end homes for $3.2 million in the US alone, according to property records.
Patrisse Khan-Cullors, 37, also eyed property in the Bahamas at an ultra-exclusive resort where Justin Timberlake and Tiger Woods both have homes, The Post has learned. Luxury apartments and townhouses at the beachfront Albany resort outside Nassau are priced between $5 million and $20 million, according to a local agent.
The self-described Marxist last month purchased a $1.4 million home on a secluded road a short drive from Malibu in Los Angeles, according to a report. The 2,370 square-foot property features “soaring ceilings, skylights and plenty of windows” with canyon views. The Topanga Canyon homestead, which includes two houses on a quarter acre, is just one of three homes Khan-Cullors owns in the Los Angeles area, public records show.
Some fellow activists were taken aback by the real estate revelations. …
Khan-Cullors embraced activism and Marxism at a young age. “It started the year I turned twelve,” she writes. “That was the year that I learned that being black and poor defined me more than being bright and hopeful and ready.”
But she didn’t rise to national prominence until 2013, when she and two other activists protested the not-guilty verdict against George Zimmerman, who shot dead Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager in Florida.
Black Lives Matter protests erupted again in 2020 after the May killing of George Floyd, who died after a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck during his arrest.
Donations and pledges from corporations and individuals poured into the movement at that point. In February, the BLM non-profit co-founded by Khan-Cullors told the AP that they took in $90 million in 2020, with $21.7 million committed to grant funding and helping 30 black-led groups across the country.
Black Lives Matter leaders would not specify how much money they took in from prominent donors, according to the AP report.
It’s also not clear how much Khan-Cullors makes in salary as one of the leaders of the movement, since its finances are split among both non-profit and for-profit entities and difficult to trace.
Jason Whitlock got suspended by Twitter for tweeting this comment:
Do you even comprehend my take? She had a lot of options on where to live. She chose one of the whitest places in California. She'll have her pick of white cops and white people to complain about. That's a choice, bro. https://t.co/rBkOnSjb4u
“There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.”
Her values and perspective fly in the face of the Left’s politics of Identity Group helpless victimization and grievance culture. So it should not be surprising that Yale Law School and the undergraduate newspaper are both going after Amy Chua.
She is being cancelled, we learn, for the hideous and outrageous crime of hosting private dinner parties, and (The horror! The horror!) sharing alcoholic beverages with Yale Law students and prominent members of the legal community.
Law students are all obviously over 21 and of legal drinking age, but apparently Chua was warned off any outside school socializing with law students in 2019 as a result of her husband Jed Rubenfeld receiving a two-year suspension after a Me-Too-style witch hunt investigation into rather vaporous accusations of “disparate treatment and boundary crossing” with females, drinking with students, “inappropriate employment practices,” and “retaliation against disloyal students.”
When I was at Yale, middle-aged male professors had affairs with attractive grad students and even sometimes with teenage undergrad coeds, and nobody thought this was a problem. The girls were of the age of consent, after all, and college students were thought to be entitled to live as adults.
So, with new allegations of recent off-campus dining and wine-bibbing with adult students and distinguished jurists, Yale Law School apparently moved silently to deprive Amy Chua of a minor academic responsibility, leading first-year small groups, and leaked details of her punishment and supposed disgrace to the Oldest College Daily before even notifying Chua.
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The witch-hunt & attempted cancellation of @amychua is a giant unforced error by @YaleLawSch.
Professor Chua is a stalwart advocate of women & minority students & the single best professor I had.
