Over the last week the stock market has enjoyed a huge rally, amidst the continuing overhang of the COVID-19 crisis and mass rioting throughout many urban areas. The market has now made up nearly all of the ground it lost starting in February. It’s either the market’s way of giving the middle finger to the virus crisis and the riots, or it could be one of the greatest short-covering rallies of all time. I’ll leave that for our insider market mavens.
Order your Lego SWAT set now before they are banned.
Meanwhile, I wish I could say that corporate presidents hadn’t decided that they need to act and emote like college presidents. To the contrary, leading American businesses are falling over each other to profess their allegiance to the Woke Catechism. The less said about Ben & Jerry’s the better. Lego has announced that it will cease advertising its police and fire-themed sets (and throw in $4 million in protection money to boot), though it won’t stop selling them—gotta move that inventory. Though I do recommend buying your Lego SWAT team set fast—I’ll predict they will become a collector’s item. Or you can buy the Lego police station set, and re-enact the sacking of the Minneapolis police station. (I’m going to keep mine next to my old McDonald’s polystyrene hamburger boxes, and my Land O Lakes butter boxes with the native American woman who has apparently gone into the witness protection program.)
Fuji bicycles has halted sales of its police model; Trek bikes is under pressure to follow. Maybe the most absurd is the demand that Hollywood stop making cop shows because most cop shows glorify the police, but if that happens at least we’ll still have T.J. Hooker reruns. (Maybe we could get that famous crossover episode where officer Hooker runs into Captain Kirk in Star Trek IV, and opens up a black hole. Can we still say “black hole,” by the way?)
I could go on since the list of corporate grovelers is quite long indeed. Aside from the protection money, much of this is simply virtue signaling, which is the secular version of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “cheap grace.” But here and there are some truly egregious steps, such as Uber, which announced several steps, including this one:
As a starting point, we will use Uber Eats to promote Black-owned restaurants while making it easier for you to support them, with no delivery fees for the remainder of the year. And in the coming weeks, we will offer discounted rides to Black-owned small businesses, who have been hit hard by COVID-19, to help in their recovery.
It is quite possible that this kind of racial and price discrimination might run afoul of both civil rights laws and anti-trust or other price discrimination laws. You might call it wokeness Uber alles.
Meanwhile, playing a hunch suggested by “Lucretia,” Power Line’s international woman of mystery, I made the following two queries with Apple’s Siri:
P.S. I am informed that this is a revised answer from Siri, and that a few days ago the reply to “All lives matter” was “I’m not sure about that.”
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