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Puzzling Over COVID-19 Deaths

The numbers are preliminary, but it seems that African Americans are dying from COVID-19 at alarming rates. In Louisiana, for instance, blacks represent 70% of the dead but only 33% of the population. In Michigan, blacks comprise 33% of the infected, but 40% of the fatalities. This has occasioned an outpouring of analysis suggesting that racism is to blame. Racism and discrimination have unarguably left grave traces in the lives of African Americans, but the rush to identify racism as the cause of this particular disparity may be too pat. CNN, like many others, cited lower levels of ...

‘The Bill Of Rights Is Above My Pay Grade’

The loss of liberty is at hand. Every day in America, mayors and governors — not one of whom is constitutionally or lawfully empowered to author laws and assign punishments for their noncompliance — are imposing new standards of behavior that nullify liberty in the name of public safety. I have been writing about this since the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in the United States — about the consequences to personal liberty in a free society that are inevitable when those in whose hands we have reposed the Constitution for safekeeping have failed us. Their failures have also been a ...

America: Home Of The Expert

This virus crisis has wiped out jobs, yes. But it has also created a lot of work for experts. Why everywhere you turn there is another expert. Usually on television. We have experts in drugs and making and distributing ventilators. We have experts in when to open up and close down cities and states. We have so many experts we could lend them out to countries by the dozens. I thought we had used up this year’s quota for child experts after the Swedish teenager came to town. She gave us her expert opinion. About how climate change is going to scorch half of us. And drown the rest of ...

Advice For Sorting Through Paperwork

Question: What advice can you offer for sorting through paperwork? Answer: We all have different comfort levels with paperwork. Some of us save everything, others shred everything. The advice I would give is somewhere in between. For personal mail, like letters, cards, e-mails with no private or protected information on them, it is your decision. I have a box I put all that stuff in each year. With the start of the new year, I tape up the old box, label it with the year, and start a new box. Why do I do that? My husband asks all the time. Someday I may want to revisit those old ...

Piercing Illusion Of ‘Immigration Ban’

President Donald Trump unleashed his “April surprise” on Monday night, sending shock waves from the Beltway Swamp to Silicon Valley with a long-overdue announcement: “In light of the attack from the Invisible Enemy, as well as the need to protect the jobs of our GREAT American Citizens,” he declared, “I will be signing an Executive Order to temporarily suspend immigration into the United States!” The usual suspects inveighed against the still-unseen proposal early Tuesday morning. My inbox was flooded with twitching and moaning from Americans for Prosperity, the Koch ...

The Virus Before The Coronavirus

With Americans hunkering down at home in the throes of the coronavirus pandemic, it can sometimes feel like the end of days. However, for an unseen number of our countrymen, today’s struggle is hardly different from a miserable day-to-day existence. If you work in the school system or as a teacher, then you know who I am talking about. The kid who comes to class with incomplete homework, a bad attitude and no respect for authority. His mother — these days the dads are hardly ever in the picture — is not engaged in her child’s life or schooling. In fact, if you were to go to her ...