On July 7, across the nation, people are being asked to only shop in stores owned by blacks. Not Hispanics, Asian-Americans, Indigenous people or single moms. Not gays or transgenders.
The Alaska Black Caucus reminds Alaskans that Tuesday is #BlackOutDay2020Alaska, “an opportunity to stand in solidarity with Black people as we work to eradicate racism by using our economic power.”
“We’re asking everyone to not spend even a penny on July 7 unless it is with a Black-owned business. This is an opportunity to make a statement in support of Black-owned businesses and Black lives.”
According to Investopedia, there were over 2 million African-American-owned firms in the United States in 2017.
Alaska black-owned businesses are listed at the Alaska Black Business Directory.
Towns across Alaska celebrated the Fourth of July with unofficial parades, after their leaders had canceled festivities due to an abundance of caution about the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak. While some simply stayed home or headed for the great outdoors, others decided that parades were still in order.
In Juneau, a group of about 50 people paraded from the Douglas Bridge to downtown, and sang God Bless America around City Hall. Their signs were in the theme of supporting law enforcement.
In downtown Juneau, they came out in support of the police.
In Homer, a parade of cars started at the school and went the length of the Homer Spit, flags unfurled.
Homer patriots on parade.
In Chugiak, a group paraded through town and ended up at the Chugiak Cafe for hot dogs. The impromptu parade was instigated by the owner of the cafe.
Ken McCarty and a parade of patriots in Chugiak.
In Anchorage, a group of antique auto enthusiasts drove the downtown and West Anchorage, organized by Antique Auto Mushers and the Midnight Sun Street Rodders.
An indelible image of the Seattle riots of 2020 is tattooed on my brain:
As the camera panned the chaotic street protest and as the cameraman tried to capture the scene, a young man, with all his white privilege in full display, jumped into the picture and waved at the viewers, saying “Hi, Grandma!” Another day at the CHAZ/CHOP riots in Seattle.
Grandma has some explaining to do. The wreckage this wilding generation has created isn’t the America of exceptionalism that patriots spoke of lovingly, hopefully, and reverently — even last year. It is not the America that Grandma was thinking she would leave for her grandchildren. And the last thing she expected was to see her grandson on a wilding.
In our cities, human waste is now smeared on our streets, graffiti defaces our buildings, historic monuments are toppled, in scenes from Mogadishu. Protesters, as though possessed, scream into the faces of our public safety officers, spitting invectives at them, as rioters break windows, loot stores, and burn buildings. Mayors call it the Summer of Love, the act of democracy. The media has told us that these are peaceful protests as though we cannot interpret what we are seeing.
One year ago, the Left was indignant at the KOMO-TV hourlong documentary called Seattle Is Dying. It’s not dying, they argued. That’s just Tucker Carlson talking, they said. Seattle is vibrant, and everyone wants to move there.
Today, the Seattle Is Dying documentary seems prophetic for America. The descent into lawlessness and addiction, and the lack of urban leadership had set the stage for revolution, even during the greatest phase of prosperity the country had ever experienced. Cities from Seattle to New York are now peppered with burned-out carcasses of neighborhoods on a scale not seen since Sherman’s “March to the Sea.”
General Sherman torched everything in his path on his way from Atlanta to Savannah. His incendiary purpose was to dishearten and frighten southerners from continuing the Confederate cause. It was, in fact, a form of terrorism, and it worked.
The Antifa/Black Lives Matter riots of 2020 are having a similar effect on American families, driving them into their cocoons. White families are especially worried that they will be attacked by the mob or their neighborhoods targeted for destruction. They are terrified they will lose their jobs because they once said that all lives matter. The terrorism has had its intended effect of making people afraid.
Most of the rioters have now dispersed. Some will protest on this Independence Day against a country that will never be enough for them. It is expected.
Others will go home to mom and dad. They’ll head to grandma’s house and take a shower, sit under the picnic umbrella and eat kale chips and vegan hot dogs, and drink the kombucha they packed for the day.
What will families talk about with these rioters who have come home for a snack at the table of normal life?
This festive day for picnics, parades, and fireworks is, for many Americans, a momentary retreat from their shellshocked lives in a country whose values have been ripped from its heart. And for thousands of families, it’s their own children who have wrought the destruction. Awkward.
The discussions that could have taken place a year ago cannot be broached, as loved ones are divided on the very worthiness of the American experiment. A younger generation — at least some of it — sees the fatal flaws and believes it must be torn down and refashioned from the ground up, while the older generation still holds on to the promise of opportunity and hope.
Arguably, we are more fractured as a nation now than at any time since the Civil War. More so than during the Vietnam War. The division within families is deeply cleaved between those who believe the best about us, and those who see the worst. Families have simply stopped talking to each other.
The American middle and working class has tolerated the invectives thrown at us, because we are a tolerant people. We know we are not racist or fascist. We love our country and we are unapologetic about our faith. Some of us don’t think Trump is the perfect president, but is the right president for the times.
But we are weary now, exhausted by the endless complaints, tantrums, and demands of the Left. We brace ourselves for the next unfair accusation or public humiliation.
Americans feel they have given and given to help level the playing field for 100 years or more, and now they just want to be left alone. Engaging with black Americans comes with a lot more risk these days, as they have the power to destroy careers and lives by uttering one word: “Racist.”
And so, here we are: Working class Americans have retreated from the field of ideas and left it to the angry Bernie Leftists, the media, and the celebrity class to determine the future of our nation.
These working and would-be-working Americans know that there’s a playbook being used, and that the ugliness will not end until Joe Biden becomes president.
And if for some reason President Trump prevails in 2020, an outcome that is tenuous at this writing, average Americans have already gotten the picture: The riots, the name calling, and the collective insanity will continue for another four years.
Americans who believe that we are better than what the Left has envisioned for us really have only one choice, and that is to plant our feet and fight for America as if our lives depend on it.
The mayor of Anchorage has been warning people to stay away from crowds. But now, he’s naming names — of bars where people have been exposed to someone with COVID-19.
In a list issued today, he not only names Anchorage bars, but even goes so far as to sweep in Seward and Palmer watering holes, expanding his jurisdiction, as it were, to other municipalities in the state.
What’s fascinating about the Berkowitz Bar Shaming Initiative is that far more people visit grocery stores, gyms, pot shops, and the Anchorage Ted Stevens International Airport every day than visit bars.
And restaurants are also open for service, but none of those categories of businesses are included in the list of where people may have come into contact with the coronavirus. Just liquor establishments.
Some critics are theorizing that Mayor Ethan Berkowitz is preparing to shut down bars again. This week, his medical officer said that people working in bars are at risk.
“I have great concern of people who work n the bars,” said Dr. Bruce Chandler. “They are really working in the danger zone, with people singing, dancing, lots of respiratory droplets.”
The bar shaming list was issued by the Anchorage Office of Emergency Management, which lists the Anchorage Moose Lodge as the place where over a period of five days, a person who was COVID-19 positive had visited eight times. But the Panhandle Bar and JJ’s Lounge were also hot spots, as it were.
Since the mayor’s mask mandate went into effect in Anchorage, the cases of COVID-19 have continued to climb. Berkowitz said earlier this week that enforcement could include civil penalties, criminal charges, and business closures if businesses did not comply with the mask mandate.
Anchorage has had over 541 cases of the virus reported, and seven of the state’s 15 deaths from COVID-19 have been Anchorage residents.
The sum total of the cases of the COVID-19 coronavirus diagnosed in Alaska in the last 123 days is 1,063 as of Friday’s tally.
And while the media focus is on the total number of infected and the 15 Alaska deaths associated with the virus, there are other deaths to consider around the state since January. Checking with the Alaska Bureau of Vital Statistics, it appears the overall death rate is about the same as usual.
Through May, homicide deaths in Alaska were down 39 percent, from an average of 28 over the past four years to just 17 this year in the first five months.
On the other hand, heart disease deaths went up by 4 percent this year compared to the four-year average. Doctors consulted by MRAK say that this is likely because the government shutdown discouraged people from going to the doctor when they needed to. 13 more people have died of heart disease this year than the average over the past four years.
On the other hand, Alaska has seen an inexplicable 7 percent fewer cancer deaths this year so far compared to the last four-year average for the same five-month period.
For flu and pneumonia, there has been a 23 percent decrease in deaths, likely due to people washing their hands, working from home, and not socializing.
Motor vehicle accident deaths are down dramatically, from 35 to 23, a reduction in road deaths by more than one third, year over year. People spent a lot less time on the road since the coronavirus hit.
According to the Bureau of Vital Statistics, death by all causes this year through May show a net of three deaths over the average, or a .15 percent increase — statistically insignificant.
It’s the title of a song from the Civil War era, in which the singer laments the peaceful times when “the boys” tented on the old campground.
Many men, most in rural areas, were members of the State militia in mid-19th Century America. Many were compelled to be members as a matter of law unless exempted.
157 years ago tonight tens of thousands of men were “tenting” on the ground between the Little Round Tops and Culp’s Hill near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
Actually, few were “tenting,” They were lying wounded on the field awaiting aid. The descriptions of that night range from macabre to merely eerie. Many tell of men singing songs of home and longing. Some describe the lanterns of the orderlies moving like fireflies on the fields seeking the wounded and trying to aid them.
Three of my four great or great-great grandfathers were there that day; two with Longstreet in the Peach Orchard and Wheat Field, both of whom lived to tell the story.
My maternal great grandfather, a generation closer because he married a young wife after his first wife died, was with Wright’s Brigade, Hill’s Corps, in the middle of the Confederate line attacking the Union line on Cemetery Ridge.
They attacked through the smoke and the setting sun and took that damned hill; they spiked the US guns. And then the support from the left didn’t come and they were alone on the hill with no support. They fell back to the Codori Barn halfway down the hill. Their admired colonel was badly wounded, and they offered a white flag to secure his removal to medical attention.
The Yankees refused, and would only accept the surrender of the entire regiment. My great grandfather took a .69 ball in his shoulder in that retreat. He was treated in a Confederate field hospital and since he was walking wounded, was returned to the ranks.
Hill’s Corps and Wright’s Brigade were something of a rear guard in Lee’s retreat. Wright’s Brigade fought in the rear guard action at Manassas Gap protecting Hill’s retreat. My great-great uncle James Marion Riner was captured and made a guest of the Yankees at Point Lookout, Maryland for awhile.
I grew up with ghosts in my closet. I understand both the predestinarian faith of the religious South and the “it would take more courage not to” loyalty to kith and kin of the Southern soldier. My great grandfather took that .69 ball in his left shoulder, was treated in a field hospital, walked 110 miles back to Richmond and fought a couple of battles along the way. He was admitted to Chimborazzo Hospital in Richmond on 16 July, two weeks after he was wounded. He was treated for his wounds and given 30 days leave to recover. He went home and married a much younger woman, from whence cometh I.
There isn’t actually a public monument of a Confederate soldier in my home town in Georgia. There are a couple of fancy private monuments to men who had a lot of money and barely crossed the county line during the Civil War; that is the way Southern society worked.
I’ve advocated to my Southern friends that they should abandon the monuments. The people who placed them there don’t live in the “doughnut” cities anymore. The White South long ago abandoned Southern cities; many, I among them, abandoned The South altogether.
Take the monuments down, preserve them, and put them in museums where they can be preserved. This fight was lost long ago.
The first airplane flight in Alaska occurred at Fairbanks on July 3, 1913.
Pilot Army Captain J. V. Martin had given a talk to the Seattle Press Club in March of 1912. A Fairbanks businessman was impressed and asked him to come to Alaska to give a flying demonstration.
Martin and his wife Lily Irvin Martin, who was England’s first woman aviator, shipped their crated airplane from Seattle to Skagway by steamship.
Still crated, it was then shipped by rail to Whitehorse, and then was shipped down the Yukon River to Fairbanks by paddleboat.
Once it was in Fairbanks, the two aviators reassembled the Gage-Martin Tractor bi-plane and on the evening of July 3, 1913, Martin took off from Exposition Park, flying over the town at an altitude of 200 feet, and at a speed of about 45 miles per hour.
This was the first airplane flight in Alaska history.
The couple flew the plane four more times around Fairbanks over the next three days. They then tried to sell the plane, but with no buyers stepping up, they dismantled it and crated it back up, before shipping it back to San Francisco, their home.
The late Jeffrey Epstein’s confidante and alleged accomplice was arrested today by the FBI in New Hampshire and charged with conspiracy and enticing minors to engage in sex and more.
Epstein, a millionaire, socialite, and convicted sex offender, reportedly hanged himself in his cell last August at a federal facility after he was accused of abusing dozens of underage girls in his mansions in Florida and New York between 2002 and 2005.
The investigation into his girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell indicates that she was helping to arrange for the underage girls — some as young as 14 — to be provided to Epstein for his sexual pleasure, and for the sexual exploitation of his friends.
Maxwell’s ties to the former owner and publisher of the Anchorage Daily News and Alaska Dispatch became known in 2014, when Maxwell came to Alaska to spend time with Rogoff during the Iditarod Sled Dog Race. How the two met and partied across Alaska was only referred to vaguely in the New York Post’s Page Six gossip column.
Maxwell is the youngest daughter of the late British publishing magnate Robert Maxwell, who was a member of Parliament, a suspected spy, and scandal-ridden fraudster, who stole millions of dollars from his companies’ pension plans, a fact only discovered after his death.
“In some instances, Maxwell was present for and participated in the sexual abuse of minor victims,” the indictment states.
FBI Assistant Director William Sweeney said she is “one of the villains of this investigation.”
Ghislaine Maxwell began the British-based charity TerraMar Project, and was a featured speaker at the Arctic Circle Assembly in Reykjavik, Iceland and in Seattle, Washington.
The Arctic Circle Assembly was founded by Alice Rogoff, former President of Iceland Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, and former Premier of Greenland Kuupik Kleist. Rogoff is still on the advisory board for the organization, but there’s no indiction the ladies have kept up their alliance, and Maxwell disbanded her nonprofit after Epstein was arrested and has been somewhat of a recluse in New England for the past year.
Meanwhile, Rogoff and her husband David Rubenstein had divorced and Rogoff drove the Alaska Dispatch (Anchorage Daily News) into bankruptcy. The paper was rescued by the Binkley family of Fairbanks, which has kept it alive since buying it for $1 million in 2017.
At an outdoor neighborhood meeting in an Anchorage culdesac on Wednesday evening, over 75 homeowners from the surrounding area set the opinion firehose to full force toward Assembly members Meg Zalatel and Felix Rivera: The purchase of the Red Lion Hotel by the Berkowitz Administration for a drug treatment center is a nonstarter, they said.
Although they were masked up and socially distanced, dozens of speakers clearly said — through their masks — that the idea proposed by Mayor Ethan Berkowitz is bad for their neighborhoods.
For one thing, one man said, the State Department of Transportation plans to use some of the Golden Lion Hotel’s parking lot for the expected overpass-underpass interchange on the Seward Highway at 36th Ave. Land on the corners of that intersection will probably go to the state through an eminent domain process.
For another thing, residents from Rogers Park said, there’s a preschool just one block away from the hotel at the David & Ruth Green Lubavitch Jewish Center on 35th Avenue.
And doctors from the neighborhoods expressed concern about the types of drugs, both pharmaceutical and street quality, that would be ever closer to homes where children play out of doors, and said the proper place for a drug treatment center would be near the hospital, not by families worried about drug addicts in their backyards.
On the spot for over an hour and a half, Zaletel and Rivera would not be pinned down on an answer but said they are still gathering information and “studying” the issue that has been proposed, which is to revise zoning so that a homeless shelter can be established somewhere in midtown. The proposal bypasses the Planning and Zoning Commission and much of the public process.
One person in the meeting pointed out to Zalatel and Rivera that if only a treatment center was planned, there would be no need for a zoning change. The zoning change was proposed by the Berkowitz Administration because, in fact, the plan is to shelter homeless drug addicts.
Zalatel admitted that a drug treatment center requires no zoning change.
All in all, the mood of the crowd, which came from Geneva Woods, College Village and Rogers Park, was decidedly “livid,” as one participant described it: “They had everything but pitchforks.”
AO 2020-58 was introduced in June, but with no mention of the actual location of what is intended to be a shelter and drug treatment facility for homeless.
But neighbors caught wind of the true plans and Must Read Alaska reported what was the real purpose of the vague ordinance that would bypass the Planning and Zoning Commission so that a large portion of midtown could be rezoned to include any number of homeless shelters.
Although Zalatel and Rivera kept saying they plan to study and gather more information, that was not enough for the group, which included many doctors and members of the Jewish community.
In a private meeting after Zalatel and Rivera had left, the group passed the hat and raised money to hire an attorney to fight the Berkowitz Administration over the proposal. Must Read Alaska has learned that they raised six figures to get started on an injunction.
A public hearing, not yet calendared, is planned for July 14 for the purchase of the hotel, which would be done with federal money intended for COVID-19 coronavirus support for the city.
