it's The Bonfire of the Vanities writ large

The USA is going nuts. The White House is apparently on lockdown. CNN's main HQ in Atlanta has been attacked by rioters. The genie is out of the lamp, and he's pissed off.


The above is a 2.5-hour podcast, but you get a clear impression of the state of the nation within the first five minutes. It didn't take long for my country to turn into a madhouse—at least in the big cities of the blue states. Yikes. Tim Pool contends that the nationwide rioting has nothing to do with the death-by-cop of George Floyd. Depending on how you take Pool's meaning, he may be right. The 1990s Los Angeles riots were an act of collective stupidity that probably had more to do with larger issues than just the exoneration of the police officers who had beaten Rodney King. If black folks were upset at white police officers, why did they attack Koreatown? At the same time, though, it's come out that George Floyd was a peace activist who is on video telling black youth to avoid guns, drugs, and a life of crime. This makes the man a saint and a martyr, so his symbolic significance has exploded in the minds of the already-outraged, i.e., George Floyd might be more relevant than the pundits think.

Pool also talks about how he might have been accidentally correct to advocate for disaster prep when he was covering the pandemic. Now, however, that prep might be necessary because of the riots and not because of SARS-CoV-2. I haven't listened to the entire podcast yet, but I did see Colion Noir talk about another form of prep that should be de rigueur for all able-bodied citizens: arming yourselves. Here's that video:


And here's Styx on what he calls "a confused mess of bullshit":