Another portent:

The US has been downgraded from a “medium risk” to a “high risk” country in a civil unrest index by the global risk analysis company Verik Maplecroft.

As nationwide protests continue over the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the firm finds that the “marginalisation of racial and religious minorities” is the single biggest driver of the unrest “because of the profound impact on the living standards of entire communities.” The conditions mean that direct acts of violence to express discontent “appeal to a broad range of community members.”

This is what I was just saying (or ranting) – George Floyd is not a one-off, George Floyd is part of the whole big picture of this country from the beginning. He’s part of the history of a former slave-owning nation that never did what it had to do after the formal ending of slavery. Slavery continued in all but name and we’ve never fully dealt with that fact, and the prison system is perpetuating it to this day.