America

What’s the matter with California? I was shocked last week to see the Latino mob riot outside a Donald Trump rally in Orange County, destroying a police car.  Excerpt from the LA Times:

“I’m protesting because I want equal rights for everybody, and I want peaceful protest,” said 19-year-old Daniel Lujan, one of hundreds in a crowd that appeared to be mostly Latinos in their late teens and 20s.

“I knew this was going to happen,” Lujan added. “It was going to be a riot. He deserves what he gets.”

Heidi Cruz dropped a bombshell during an Indiana campaign trail on Saturday, saying that her husband Senator Ted Cruz “is an immigrant”.  “Ted is an immigrant. He is Hispanic,” Heidi Cruz said of her husband, an American citizen who renounced his Canadian citizenship even though he was born north of the American border. “He can unify this party.” “We have libertarians joining our cause. I have people every day from the Democrat Party telling me that they re-registered to vote for Ted as a Republican.

A popular Iranian newspaper has called on the government to intercept US cargo ships stationed in the Persian Gulf in retaliation to America freezing Iran’s assets.  Kayhan newspaper urged the government to take action, after Iran’s appeal to the UN to stop US violations of state immunity and seizure of assets fell on deaf ears. Presstv.com reports: Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif wrote to UN chief Ban Ki-moon on Thursday to ask him to intervene with his “good offices,” but the United Nations said it would intervene should both parties request it.

When Beyoncé Knowles-Carter dropped her surprise Lemonade record on HBO last Sunday night, the Internet, well, it lost its mind. Perhaps moreso than any other artist recording today, Mrs. Knowles-Carter commands the power to reduce adult human beings into automata programmed for the typing of assorted punctuation.

As the online world exulted in the opening baseball bat pyrotechnics of Beyoncé’s seeming record of recovery from her husband’s infidelity, however, Brentin Mock at The Atlantic‘s CityLab was captured by a moment of quiet and stillness:

The falcon cannot hear the falconer, wrote William Butler Yeats. Political leaders, like the falcon, were meant to obey their minders, but Yeats’s falcon had soared above them and loosed mere anarchy on the world. Today, Donald Trump’s campaign soars above our conservative elites, who in their foundations, their little magazines, their think tanks, define what conservatives may do or say. Trump ignores them, they tell us, and disorder and chaos must follow.