Annals Of Central Planning

Minnesota “needs” 381 “cannabis dispensaries”, according to the same people who claimed that the state would have 20,000 Covid deaths, “best case”, by July of 2020.

And if you think that’s a curious number to arrive at, you’re right:

Now that recreational marijuana is legal, Minnesota will need nearly 400 dispensaries to comply with state law, a new study reveals.

The law requires one dispensary for every 12,500 Minnesotans. That totals to a minimum of 381 cannabis dispensaries across the state.

Why that exact ratio – a ratio higher than the ratio of McDonalds restaurants to Minnesotans?

Well, y’see, there was a study:

Participants in the study included Minnesotans who have consumed marijuana within the past year. Of those participants, 83% reported cannabis consumption at least once a month. Forty percent reported consuming cannabis “daily or almost daily.”

Still doesn’t make sense?

Just remember – the whole thing is a wealth transfer from taxpayers to the political class that employs the bureaucrats that’ll administer this inevitable soon-to-be boondoggle.

Now it makes sense, right?

Clearly They Need One Of Those “In This House…” Signs

Staffer for conservative GOP Latina congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna discusses how loving and accepting the left is:

Berg’s Eighth Law has no exceptions.

Opportunity Drifts

A friend of the blog emails:

With this most recent snowstorm, there has been lots of discussion about snow removal. Reasonable people look at the streets of Minneapolis and Saint Paul and say no wonder people are moving to suburbs-the cities are just incompetent.

Leftist urbanists look at the state of the streets of Minneapolis and Saint Paul and giggle saying ha ha car drivers. We hate you and get out of our city so we can drive it all ourselves.

The really clueless look at the condition of the streets of Minneapolis and Saint Paul and say, hey! Let’s charge people even more so we can mess up sidewalks (alleys in the case of Saint Paul) the same way we mess up the streets. You people don’t really need to be anywhere for the winter anyway, right? Just let us take good care of you.

Everything from cradle to grave is an opportunity to transfer money and power from people to the institutions of big left.

Once you internalize that, you understand the goals of the DFL.

Roll Model

Henco Sheriff David Hutchinson continues to get concierge service from the “criminal justice” system.

Minnesota’s Board of Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) has suspended the license of Hennepin County Sheriff Dave Hutchinson for 30 days, starting next month…The board voted to suspend his license for 180 days, however 150 days are stayed on the condition he doesn’t commit any similar offenses in the next three years.

So – he got his whiz test delayed, he got a VIP booking involving no jail time, he got the lightest possible charge, low enough not to cause his cashiering from the Sheriff’s Department, and now he’s getting a slap on the wrist from the POST board.

Think a GOP politician, to say nothing of a private schlub, would get this sort of treatment?

Great Time For A Strike, Denise…”

Minneapolis teachers will likely be walking off the job.

The timing…doesn’t seem great, from their perspective:

I think Majority Leader Gazelka got this one right:

The Hennepin County Way

He drove with a .13 blood alcohol content (as of test time, hours later, indicating he had closer to a .17 at the time of the crash).

He drove 126MPH down 94, up until he went off the road.

He drove, thus hammered, carrying his service firearm (or at least a .357 magnum revolver in a holster), at a blood alcohol level 3-4 times the level at which a civilian would lose their permit.

He lied to officers about the crash; he didn’t invoke his 5th Amendment right to remain silent (which is legal, constitutionally protected, and good); he actually lied.

The story of Sheriff Hutchinson’s DUI and crash just keeps getting worse and worse:

The Governor and Lieutenant Governor asked for his resignation.

But that’ll be the end of it.

Not because the DFL is out to protect Hutchinson; the “progressives” have a hand-picked candidate even more “progressive” than Hutchinson waiting for November. The DFL will endorse her, and Hutchinson will be shunted aside like last year’s model.

But until then? If the DFL let it he known that driving drunk was a real problem, they’d endanger the prospects of one of their candidates, in a year when the DFL expects to have enough problems.

That’s how life, and politics, in a one-party autocracy works.

Panicky Elites, Resilient Normies

“Government is all the things we do together – stupidly and ineffectively”.

Government is ponderous and brittle. People, when acting in enlightened self-interest, usually make the right call.

My favorite example: before 9/11, the official guidance for people in skyscraper offices in case of a major emergency was to wait for official instructions. The powers that be assumed that people would be a panicky mob, there’d be stampedes in the stairwells, and more people would die from the panic than from the disaster, since humans are (to officialdom) like longhorns in a thunderstorm.

Of course, on 9/11, the normies ignored the instructions to stay in their cubes – and, more importantly, they self-organized an evacuation that got just about everyone below the points of impact out of the Twin Towers that morning. Another epic self-organization led to the more or less organic appearance of the greatest maritime evacuation since Dunkirk, as boats, official and private, carried people across the Hudson and East Rivers, without any need for official guidance.

Government learned nothing from this, of course; one of the first rule of public health crisis communications is to try to convince people of one or both of two things; “you’re going to die a horrible death if you dbn’t follow directions”,, or “your children are going to die a horrible death if you don’t follow directions”.

Doesn’t sound very confident in human intelligence, does it?

People can be breathtakingly stupid – but enlightened self-interest is a powerful force for good.

It’s by no means a rare trait.

I talked about this article in “Commentary” last weekend on the show – “Elite Panic vs. the Resilient Populace” by James Meigs.

It’s about the gulf between the panicky official response to the Anchorage Earthquake of 1964 – the strongest earthquake in North American history – and the calm, purposeful response of the normies, who organized themselves much more effectively than the local authorities did.

The officlals assumed that the populace would panic:

Almost as soon as the shaking stopped, city officials began worrying about how the populace would respond. With every shop window broken, would looters ransack the local merchants? Would citizens panic at the sight of the dead or wounded? Police quickly deputized a group of volunteers—some of them freshly emerged from those Fourth Avenue bars—as ad hoc officers. The men put on armbands with the word police emblazoned in lipstick—a few were even issued firearms—and off they went to protect the city from the inevitable post-disaster crime wave.

The Anchorage officials weren’t being unusually paranoid. At the time, most experts believed any major disaster would cause “a mass outbreak of hysterical neurosis among the civilian population,” as social scientist Richard M. Titmuss had put it some years earlier. Shocked by carnage and desperate for food and shelter, people would “behave like frightened and unsatisfied children.” Only firm control by powerful authorities could keep the lid on such dangerous situations….Disaster researchers call this phenomenon “elite panic.” When authorities believe their own citizens will become dangerous, they begin to focus on controlling the public, rather than on addressing the disaster itself. They clamp down on information, restrict freedom of movement, and devote unnecessary energy to enforcing laws they assume are about to be broken. These strategies don’t just waste resources, one study notes; they also “undermine the public’s capacity for resilient behaviors.” In other words, nervous officials can actively impede the ordinary people trying to help themselves and their neighbors.

This led the authorities to devote far more effort to controlling crowds that tryint to rescue people trapped in buildings.

Sound familiar?

In the meantime, the normies organized themselves, and did what needed to be done:

Cars were buried in debris. One station wagon had been crushed almost flat by a concrete slab; Chance could hear a woman’s voice coming from inside. A crowd of people was trying to save her, clawing at the slab. Then a man stepped forward to organize the effort. Somehow, two tow trucks were located; they were able to split the slab partially in two. Another man climbed into the breech with a cutting torch—a cutting torch!—and carved a hole in the vehicle’s roof. The woman was pulled free, gravely injured but alive. She would survive. [Anchorage TV reporter Genie] Chance later marveled that all the people involved in the operation were mere passersby—impromptu volunteers. And yet they functioned as a team. Though she didn’t know it at the time, this dynamic was being replicated all over the city.

Officialdom was, in the meantime ,paralyzed by the collapse of its assumptions:

[Psychologist] Enrico Quarantelli, the leader of [a team of academics that flew to Anchorage to study the response], was particularly interested in Anchorage’s small Civil Defense office. It should have been in charge of search and rescue, but, Quarantelli noted, had quickly become bogged down over questions of bureaucratic protocol. Of course, Bill Davis’s amateur mountaineers had taken over that function almost immediately. Quarantelli used the term “emergent groups” to describe teams of self-organized volunteers like Davis’s searchers. He didn’t miss the irony that the agency created to protect civilians soon became an obstacle that this emergent group of rescuers had to work around. And, far from being a hindrance to trained first responders, those gangs of citizens turned out to be an indispensable resource.

It’s not a new phenomenon at all:

Disaster researchers call this phenomenon “elite panic.” When authorities believe their own citizens will become dangerous, they begin to focus on controlling the public, rather than on addressing the disaster itself. They clamp down on information, restrict freedom of movement, and devote unnecessary energy to enforcing laws they assume are about to be broken. These strategies don’t just waste resources, one study notes; they also “undermine the public’s capacity for resilient behaviors.” In other words, nervous officials can actively impede the ordinary people trying to help themselves and their neighbors.

I urge you to read the entire piece.

I urge you to read the whole thing – in particular, the article’s focus on the importance of getting reliable, trustworthy information to the population:

 Fear of public panic remains common today. Disaster literature bulges with examples—from Hurricane Katrina, to the 2011 Japan tsunami, to the current coronavirus pandemic—in which officials suppressed information, or passed along misinformation, out of concern over an unruly populace…One symptom of elite panic is the belief that too much information, or the wrong kind of information, will send citizens reeling. After the 2011 tsunami knocked out Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, officials gave a series of confusing briefings. To many, they seemed to be downplaying the amount of radiation released in the accident. In the end, the radiation risks turned out to be much lower than feared, resulting in no civilian deaths. But, by then, the traumatized public had lost faith in any official statements. As one team of researchers notes, any “perceived lack of information provision increases public anxiety and distrust.”

Similar example. the Bengal Famine of 1942, where British/Indian authorities clamped down on information, causing the rumor mill to take over, leading to food hoarding and bureacratic – dare we say, “elite” – panic, leading to two million starvataion deaths, in a place with plenty of food.

Think of that when you remember the Minnesota Department of Health’s refusal to divulge the mathematical model by which it predicted tens of thousands of Covid deaths by July 2020i, as a best case, because “people might reach different resujlts”.

A Thought Experiment

Let’s say you had a couple bumps at a bar – like, say, 8 to 12 of them. And then decided to drive home.

You were carrying a gun, and a car full of loose ammunition.

You drove down the freeway, until you didn’t – you swerved off the road, rolled your car, scattering ammunition all over the place. You had to be extricated, in no condition for a field sobriety test. When you finally took a whiz test at the hospital, you tested at a .13 BAC – 50% above the legal limit,and a level that indicates you were likely at a .17 during the accident itself.

And you’re a civilian.

Do you think the county attorney is going to let you plead out to fourth degree DUI?

I’m referring of course to Henco Sheriff Dave Hutchinson.

Or course. you wouldn’t. At the very least, the County Attorney would put you through a legal wringer, and make sure you settled with charges that involved serious time in jail.

So – is it just county employee mutual backscratching?

Maybe.

Now ask yourself – would Rich Stanek, the previous Sheriff and the last elected Republican of any kind in Henco, have gotten the same treatment?

Remember how the media covered his adult son’s behavior. before you answer that.

Oh, yeah – the media. The only media actually covering this story are the conservative alternative media here in MInnesota:

So perhaps we call it “DFL Privilege?”

Sheriff Hutchinson

My question isn’t whether Sheriff Hutchinson drove impaired last weekend – though it seems likelyl.

It’s not why – cops are prone to drinking, and it’s been a rough couple years.

It’s not whether he drove in a county vehicle.

It’s not whether he got favorable treatment from the State Patrol – which didn’t post the details of his crash for nearly half a day (2.5 hours is the norm), or took a urine test rather than a more accurate. blood test when Hutchinson got to the hospital. Cops generally look out for cops. Of course the Patrol went easy on the Sheriff.

No. My question is this:

The Sheriff was said to have been partying at a resort full of sheriffs, at the State Sheriff’s Association meeting, at the Arrowwood Resort near Alexandria – a room full of people whose departments spend a lot of time, and earn a big part of their budgets, arresting, prosecuting and fining drunk drivers – very frequently, people with blood alcohol levels between .08 and .1, which in most people is barely perceptible intoxication, a lowering of the limit that was almost entirely done to allow more arrests and prosecutions of people pulled over for other offenses – tail-lights, expired tabs – after a beer or two. They run departments whose deputies have prosecuted DUI cases that have gotten many menaces off the road, it’s true – and also put a “DUI” on the recrods of nearly 10% of Minnesotans – a blotch that goes on to infringe their civil rights, their employment prospects, and their status in the community.

And yet, nobody in that resort full of sheriffs thought to tell Hutchinson “er, maybe you oughtta stay and have a couple cups of coffee, or bunk up at a Best Western for the night”, or anything of the sort.

No – off he went.

And, one presumes, off most of them went, as well, presumably after a bump or two themselves.

Nobody in that room full of people that have helped arrest and convict 10% of the entire state of DUI thought to pull Hutchinson aside?

“Gosh, Why Do People Distrust Our Public Health Messaging?”

Uh, because they routinely lie to you, and we know it, but they keep on trying to deny it?

Whistle blown on Bloomington public health director, lying to school parents about the effectiveness of masks:

Emphasis added:

At an August 2 “Return to School” webinar on the district’s proposed COVID plan, Kelley urged parents to get their kids vaccinated, calling it the “cornerstone” to containing COVID. Next up in his presentation, Kelly unveiled a list of best practices for schools to follow in preventing the spread of the virus, emphasizing masks were the most important tool of all.

“They’re called best practices because this is the evidence-based data we have for driving how to protect kids in school environments based on experiences we saw in the last two school years,” Kelley said in the August meeting posted on YouTube. “Masking is at the top of that list. The ability to have source control and some aspect of protection for the wearer is a phenomenal tool to control a respiratory pathogen like COVID.”

Yet in a closed door meeting of Bloomington Public Health staff the week school began, Kelley appeared to offer a markedly different view of the usefulness of mandatory masking at schools, according to a watchdog who attended the virtual meeting.

“In terms of purely broad effectiveness, the least effective mitigation we’re implementing in this process is masking,” Kelley said in a recording provided by the watchdog. “Masking, the quality of the consistency of the fit, all those things are highly variable in a population setting.”

It’s becoming a Berg’s Law; anyone who refers to an argument as “evidence-based” should be distrusted and verified – and, almost invariably, distrusted thereafter.

The Praetorians

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Our last defense against liberal tyranny has always been the military. They won’t fire on us, they are us, the military think the way we do.
Not anymore. In a couple of years, the new officers trained under the new regime will be in the field commanding troops. Either we will see officers leading troops against Americans, or a massive surge of fragging. Neither is good for the nation.
Joe Doakes

The US military has over 20 years of constant warfare become one of America’s most respected institutions.

For the past 40 years or so, Americans have trusted it to be the last, best defense against tyranny, whether imposed from abroad or within.

I think Joe may be a tad Pollyanna-ish: The flag rank officers who came up through the upper field grades under the Obama administration, reflect in the politics of that era.

Our founding fathers were right to be nervous of the standing military. I’m hoping we don’t we don’t find out exactly how right they were in the near future.

Black Bag Operation

A few weeks ago, when the “city of Minneapolis” first “tried” to “Clear” George Floyd Square, at 38th and Chicago, they spun it (with the willing connivance of our media) to try to make it appear that a community group had somehow gotten a bunch of city trucks and their unionized employees out to one of the edgiest flashpoints in America without the mayor knowing about it.

As if it just…happened. Spontaneously.

Go ahead. Get your community group to try it.

It’s apparently spreading. Lisa Bender seems to think city crews are out wildcatting.

After city employees went to clean graffiti off the streets of Minneapolis, City Council President Lisa Bender allegedly stopped the process. When Bender first heard about the cleanup work being done, she wrote that she assumed the city employees “were talked into this [cleaning up the graffiti] by the business association.”

In a later tweet, she said that the public works employees “mistook the drive aisle” at the location of the Winston Smith memorial for a “public space.”

I remember the good old days, when Minneapolils just competed with Portland and Seattle for “miles of bike lanes per capita”.

Surprised Not Surprised

I planned a vacation, leaving January 14 and returning January 21. I
went on-line two weeks early, January 6, to request the Post Office hold
my mail. Had to create an on-line account to submit the request. Had
to verify my identity to create the on-line account using multi-factor
authentication. But not by email – not available – nor by text message – their system doesn’t work with my phone. By mail.

The authentication code to establish the on-line account so they could
accept the on-line request to hold my snail mail arrived in my mailbox
on Saturday, January 23, two days after my scheduled return.

You want to know why people despise the Post Office? It’s not the
workers – they’re standard issue government employees following the
rules laid down by management because the workers have no authority to
deviate from the rules and independent thought is punishable by
dismissal. It’s the bureaucracy: the stunning idiocy of the
regulations, the stubborn adherence to 19th Century service and delivery
guidelines, the utter failure to recognize what needs to be done to make
the Post Office relevant and competitive in 2021.

It’s sad, because the Post Office is one of the few activities the
federal government is constitutionally authorized to do. It’s a shame
they do it so poorly.

Joe Doakes

Nothing to add…

Pain

My wife as a 40-year history of low back pain.  It’s been good lately,
but she stumbled and fell the other day.  Now, she’s in intense pain,
can barely move.  We’ve been icing and heating, ibuprofen and Tylenol,
not helping.

Because of the opioid crisis, she cannot get stronger pain medicine
without a diagnosis.  She can’t get a diagnosis without imaging (MRI). 
She can’t get imaging without a doctor’s order. She can’t see her doctor
because she’s out of town.  So today we’re going in at 6:00 p.m. to see
some new doctor hoping for an imaging order and some temporary pain
relief, a couple of Vicodin, just to get through the night.

It’s insulting, it’s shameful, it’s infuriating that a senior citizen
must lie in pain because some bureaucrat is worried about junkies
getting high.  If I knew where to get black-market Vicodin, I’d buy it
in a heartbeat.  And don’t even get me thinking about sticking up – I
mean, peacefully protesting – my local drugstore.  I’ve already got the
mask.

Joe Doakes

I had some exposure to this issue during the session – I was involved with some friends, drumming up phone calls to help reform the “Reforms” that led to the situation Joe describes, “reforms” that made it possible for the authorities to destroy the careers of doctors who prescribed painkillers out of line with untrained bureaucrats’ recommendations.

Talking with Representatives on the subject – including my own “representative”, Rena Moran – was a truly horrifying experience. One got the impression that the original “Reforms” had been pure ass-covering for the legislators (and neither party was blameless, not that I’m going to give Moran any slack), and with asses covered, they were done discussing the issue.

I used to joke that for Ron Paul to achieve the goals for which he campaigned in 2008 or 2012, he’s have had to have staged a libertarian coup d’etat, and imposed liberty by force via an absolute libertarian dictatorship.

That’s becoming less and less facetious over time.

Timing

A friend of the blog emails:

Do I have this right? The pandemic has reduced commuter travel as employees and students work from home. The buses all say “essential travel only” and are not allowing the crowds they once had. Honestly, they probably don’t even have the crowds- fewer people are using the bus right now. I haven’t been on a bus lately, but I still get the texts about reduced service. Several times a day, buses aren’t running for all sorts of reasons.

Yet, despite all of this, Metro Transit employees were set to get a 2.5% raise and a $1500 bonus? The hospital where I work cancelled raises, eliminated CEU money, and cancelled the Holiday parties and meals because elective surgeries were cancelled for 2 months. Yet, these transit employees think their bonus and 2.5% raise are “crappy offers” and rejected the offer, voting for a strike?????

 I rarely use such language, but seriously, WTF is wrong with these people? I mean, look around- they ought to be happy with being employed, let alone a raise this year.

If Metro Transit struck now, who would know? 

Other than the people the DFL and their public employee union enablers want to keep miserable anyway? 

Heroes Walking Among Us

Went for a walk, saw this sign, having trouble identifying the symbol for “government bureaucrats.”  


Hey, we’re essential, you know.  Those papers aren’t going to shuffle themselves.  
Joe Doakes

Sardonic as Joe is, he knows as well as anyone that government workers of all kinds are the most essential workers there are. They’re public employees union members – the backbone of the DFL.

They’re essential to his and the DFL’s power.

But we all knew this.

Surprising Nobody (Who’s Been Paying Attention At All)

“Unexpectedly”, Minnesota’s neighbors – well, at least the ones run by people who came up through the world of business, rather than public employment or the non-profit/industrial complex – are kicking Minnesota’s passive-aggressive tush at dealing with Coronavirus.

You could look at it in terms of deaths per million (South Dakota is 1/3 Minnesota’s rate; North Dakota, half). You could look at it in terms of ICU utilization (all are doing all right, but it’s interesting to imagine how much better the lower-density states would be doing but for the ravages of Obamacare on rural healthcare).

Oh, yeah – and testing?

Which Governor Walz, for about the tenth time in six weeks put out there as the dispositive factor in re-opening, notwithstanding the fact that Minnesota’s bureaucracy is no better at un-flattening the curve with tests than it is at managing its budget?

Oh, what do you think? Numbers as of yesterday.

North Dakota 54,330
South Dakota 22,009
Nebraska 21,253
Iowa 21,206
Wisconsin 17,695
Minnesota 17,625

Bear in mind, progs in the audience – this is in terms of tests per million.

The businesspeople – who largely happen to be Republicans, but that’s more an effect than a cause – are doing the job better.

Suppose Minnesota will learn the lesson?

The Turning Point?

The media and the Walz administration – pardon, largely, the redundancy – is waving around a bunch of polls by a bunch of left-leaning pollsters showing overwhelming support for keeping the state’s economy shut down until…um, they’ll get back to you on that.

I’ve noticed that an awful lot of those supporting a vapor-tight lockdown until (insert yet another set of Walz Administration goals – I have a hard time keeping up with ’em) have steady incomes that aren’t going anywhere. State workers, employees of schools and universities, non-profiteers in sectors with revenues that aren’t going anywhere.

But all that might change soon. From yesterday’s Governor’s presser:

Gov. Tim Walz says he’s not ready to rule anything out _ including layoffs and furloughs of state employees.

I’m gonna suspect that starts some DFLers thinking critically about risk aversion.

Government Is The Things We Do Together – Stupidly And Arbitrarily

A Long Lake restaurant tries to put on a drive in movie, complete with take-out food with all the socially-distance, plague-aware trimmings.

The state shut them down:

Birch’s On the Lake has lost around 70% of its regular revenue while doing take-out only during the stay at home order.

The owner came up with a plan to do a family night at the drive-in outside the Long Lake restaurant.

“It sold out in a day,” Burton Joseph said.

The plan was to hand out notes to customers explaining the safety rules: stay in their cars, maintain distance, and no alcohol. They would be allowed to call in an order for take-out to eat in their cars.

On Monday state officials told Joseph they could not have the event.

“If we’re coming up with the ideas to keep everyone safe at this point I feel like they deserve to give someone a chance,” Joseph said.

Yet again: we have a government run by a man who’s never had a significant job in the private sector, at the head of an administration that has nothing but contempt for businesspeople…

…telling the people who actually have the interests of not only their business, but the customers and communities that are their livelihood, and who have greatest stake in providing creative solutions to our mutual problems, how to behave.

This is the sort of thing that delegitimizes government authority, and leaves you with a Ukraine, a Belanus, a Venezuela.

Science!

King Walz the First angrily denounced right-wing kook websites speculating that the newest plan to placate the coronavirus involved sacrificing virgins.

“Nothing could be further from the truth,” he said. “Our plan is simply to have Joe Biden sniff their hair. It has been amply demonstrated that no person has died from coronavirus while having their hair sniffed by the President-Nearly-Elect. The plan has worked, works perfectly, continues to work, and anyone who questions or criticizes it is a science denier.”

King Walz did not specify how virgins would be selected, or their virginity verified, before being sent to the undisclosed location where Candidate Biden is in self-imposed quarantine with a small harem.

From the Capital, Joe Doskes, reporting.

In related news, the State of Minnesota Heath Economist neither confirmed nor denied that his office uses sheep entrails for “modeling”.

Epiphany

A friend of the blog emails:

My child is not going to public school. Now that we are doing home based learning, the school continues to provide the excellent education we expected. We have a high quality teacher who gives a daily schedule that has my child doing educational work, physical activity related to the daily lesson, and 2 daily live meetings online with the entire class. This is how I envision the home school program should look. Advanced grade levels at this school are doing online group work in addition to the daily meetings with the entire class. This school is taking learning seriously. But, they were before being sent home, too.

My colleagues who have children in public schools have a different story. They tell me all their kids get is “busy work.” They tell me their kids are no longer learning anything and that home based learning “just doesn’t work for public schools.” “It’s a joke, really,” they tell me.

I honestly believe a percentage of the problem is the parents- they may be too busy to be involved, dealing with other family members, dealing with this economic crisis, etc. But, I also wonder if they have forgotten their own school experiences. Or how involved were they when their children were in actual school? In my view, a lot of public school is busy work. Why would their home program be any different?

I have a hunch that for kids whose notion of ‘education’ is learning from what goes on around them in life and applying their innate curiosity to the found opportunities the world is full of, this period could be a fantastic learning experience.

The public factory school model is not designed to foster that.

I’ve also heard – anecdotally, natch – that some public school parents, coming face-to-face with their kids curriculum for the first time, have been genuinely horrified at the, well, general uselessness of the whole charade.

One hopes that feeling carries through when the crisis is over.

Officer Friendly

There’s a video of two Calumet County Wisconsin Sheriff’s deputies hassling a woman because her kids went to the neighbor’s house to play. 

In response, the Sheriff posted this message:  

The problem with both the video and the response is the attitude.  This is the kind of behavior that gets people upset at law enforcement.  

Look at the male deputy in the video.  His tone is berating.  His attitude is condescending.  His body language is aggressive.  The Sheriff says the Deputy is there to educate the mother, that the deputies were not there because of a violation of the order.  But that’s what the deputies accuse her of – violating the order by letting her kids play at the neighbor’s house. 

The male deputy’s posture and word choice is confrontational.  He doesn’t educate, he berates.  It angers me just watching it.  He did nothing to de-escalate the situation.  
The female deputy’s passive-aggressive behavior is little better.  She doesn’t educate or placate, she’s there to document the contact for future prosecution because now the mother has been warned.  And the mother was uncooperative!  That’s going on her Permanent Record!  

That is the sort of officious, snotty, condescending, infuriating behavior by petty tyrants that causes unrest, as in “unrest in the Middle East” or “another day of unrest in Northern Ireland.”  People who can’t behave professionally in customer-facing positions should find another line of work.

Let me be perfectly clear for law enforcement and other people of limited intellectual ability: I am not calling for people to shoot cops.  But if this woman had and I were on the jury, I’d vote to acquit.
Joe Doakes

There’s something about “public service” that brings the worst out of a certain type of personality – the kind wonderfully parodied by Rainn Wilson for nine years as “Dwight Schrute”.

Although this isn’t funny.