I think it’d be useful to document, from an almost anthropological standpoint, what happens in a “progressive’s” mind when they talk about “common sense gun laws”.

For example, when Virginia attorney-general Mark Herring – a Democrat, natch – says “let’s implement a common-sense measure ending reciprocity in carry permits with other states”, what he really means is “let’s make sure that people from other states who have documented histories of being reliably law-abiding citizens can’t carry their guns legally in Virginia“.

Criminals remain free to carry whatever they want, as always.

Seems commonsensical to me.

You know what else sounds like common sense?  Minnesota should refuse to honor Virginia driver’s licenses until they honor our carry permits.

Because we wouldn’t want dumbass Virginians on our roads, now, would we?

A Brief Bit Of Background:  Whenever I sit down in a large room with a bunch of co-workers to “meet” a new manager, and that manangers starts their presentation with “I’m a ‘process person'”, I tell my co-workers “Well, time to get our resumes polished up.  This department is screwed blue”.

And I’ve never been wrong.

Another Bit Of Personal Background:  Whenever I decry some miscarriage of justice, and some twerp – often a liberal, Ivy-League law-school grad – smugly intones “the process was met!”, I’m kept from strangling Ivyleaguer with his own intestines only with great difficulty, and sometimes only by other people.

Paging Petty Tyrants: There’s an old cliche; “state and local goverment are the laboratories of Democracy”.  Perhaps it’s true – but Pageville, Missouri is conducting an experiment in democracy’s extinction.

Faced with a court ruling that capped how much the city could earn in traffic fines, they decided to add fines for…

…well, pretty much everything, according to George Will:

Pagedale residents are subject to fines if they walk on the left side of a crosswalk; if they have a hedge more than three feet high, a weed more than seven inches high, or any dead vegetation on their property; or if they park a car at night more than 500 feet from a street lamp or other source of illumination; or if windows facing a street do not have drapes or blinds that are “neatly hung, in a presentable appearance, properly maintained and in a state of good repair”; or if their houses have unpainted foundations or chipped or aging layers of paint (even on gutters); or if there are cracks in their driveways; or if on a national holiday — the only time a barbeque may be conducted in a front yard — more than two people are gathered at the grill or there are alcoholic beverages visible within 150 feet of the grill.

Upshot; it’s pretty much impossible not to violate some sort of law or another in Pageville, MO.

But the city’s pecuniary interest in particular judicial outcomes, which creates an appearance of bias, is not the crux of the argument that the city is violating the 14th Amendment guarantee that Americans shall not be deprived of life, liberty, or property without “due process of law.” The entire nation should hope that this small city’s pettiness will be stopped by a court that says this: The Due Process Clause, properly construed, prohibits arbitrary government action, particularly that which unjustifiably restricts individuals’ liberties.

That is, the Due Process Clause is not purely about process.

And if this case were a step toward enshrining, Heller-like, the idea that government isn’t about sanctifying process, but upholding the freedom of the citizen, it would be a huge start.

Because the sooner the idea that government exists to protect process is rhetorically loaded into a train and sent to a camp in Idaho to smash metaphorical rocks for a few decades, the better this country will be.

The “gun safety” movement’s latest bright idea is “No Fly, No Buy”; people on one of the various government no-fly/terrorist watch lists would be disqualified from buying guns.

Second Amendment human rights activists oppose the idea, to the deep confusion of anti-gunners, who just don’t understand why it’s a bad idea.

The answer?  It’s a bad idea because government can’t be trusted with lists of people built without due process.  Ever!

I’ve added emphasis:

The Maryland State Police classified 53 nonviolent activists as terrorists and entered their names and personal information into state and federal databases that track terrorism suspects, the state police chief acknowledged yesterday.
Police Superintendent Terrence B. Sheridan revealed at a legislative hearing that the surveillance operation, which targeted opponents of the death penalty and the Iraq war, was far more extensive than was known when its existence was disclosed in July.

You gotta break eggs to make an omelet.

To:  Councilman Dai Thao
From:  Mitch Berg, next year’s “unwelcome” person
Re:  Next project?

Councilman Thao:

In re your proposed resolution barring The Donald for making Muslims feel bad; it looks like you’ve got more work to do.

That is all.

I’m not a big Donald Trump fan.

No.  Really .  Not.  A.  Fan.

But I’m reminded of Churchill’s statement about Stalin; he didn’t care for him, but if Satan were Hitler’s enemy, Churchill would at least do lunch with him.

And so the Saint Paul City Council might be responsible for me doing  lunch with The Donald, after they put their own special carve-out in the First Amendment:

The St. Paul City Council will vote Wednesday on a resolution that condemns presidential candidate Donald Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric and declares Trump unwelcome within the city limits….[Councilman Dai Thao] acknowledged on Thursday he had not yet touched base with fellow council members on the resolution. “We think it will pass,” he said. “St. Paul has always been welcoming to immigrants.”

But not, apparently, dissent in any form.

Dear Mr. Trump:  While I won’t be voting for you at caucuses, I beg of you; please, please, please come to Saint Paul (aka “Chicago on the Mississippi”).  Call these morons on their bluff.

It’d be the show of the century.

It’s another big win for urban liberal privilege.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Seems to me I read a similar proposal on SITD lately.

Maybe you’re inspiring a national movement!!

Joe Doakes

I’m like the “Murray the K” of gun rights.

Russia bars George Soros’ “Open Society Project” from Russia.

A Berg Administration would recognize them as a bigger long-term danger to this country than ISIS or Al Quaeda.

I wonder if Rep. Kim Norton, and NY Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, think these people should have their civil rights squashed because some bureaucrat put them on a terrorist watch and/or “no fly” list?

Or maybe this guy?

Yesterday, we noted that Rep. Kim Norton – the soon-to-be retired legislator from Rochester who’s going to be pushing the various gun-control bills that the DFL is copying and pasting from their benefactors at Bloomberg – accused people who oppose US Senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s “idea” of barring anyone on the government’s double-dog-secret “Terrorist Watch List” from buying guns, of “supporting allowing terrorists to have weapons”.

No, I’m serious.  In an incredible display of the kind of logic that most adults were shamed out of using back in fourth grade, Norton accused Bryan Strawser of the MN Gun Owners Political Action Committee of supporting guns in the hands of terrorists:

And this introduced an interesting question: what does it take to get on the list?

From that noted conservative tool, the HuffPo, we learn that this watch list is something of a roach hotel; easy to get in, impossible to get out.  I’m abridging the copy from the HuffPo, which you should read in its entirety:

1. You could raise “reasonable suspicion” that you’re involved in terrorism. “Irrefutable evidence or concrete facts” are not required.

In determining whether a suspicion about you is “reasonable,” a “nominator” must “rely upon articulable intelligence or information which, taken together with rational inferences from those facts,” can link you to possible terrorism. As Scahill and Devereaux noted, words like “reasonable,” “articulable” and “rational” are not expressly defined. While the document outlines the need for an “objective factual basis,” the next section clarifies that “irrefutable evidence or concrete facts are not necessary” to make a final determination as to whether a suspicion is “reasonable.” So how could intelligence officials be led to put you on the watch list?

Funny they mention that:

2. You could post something on Facebook or Twitter that raises “reasonable suspicion.”

 

According to the document, “postings on social media sites … should not be discounted merely because of the manner in which it was received.”

Someone who doesn’t like you reports you to a governnment bureaucrat, who thinks “what the heck, better safe than sorry!”, and will never be held accountable for it…

…and boom!  There you are!

(Whoops – can I say “boom” anymore?)

And if you think government wouldn’t do that?  Do you really think Lois Lerner was the only bureaucrat to abuse her authority for political ends?

3. Or somebody else could just think you’re a potential terror threat.

The guidelines also consider the use of “walk-in” or “write-in” information about potential candidates for the watch list. Nominators are encouraged not to dismiss such tips and, after evaluating “the credibility of the source,” could opt to nominate you to the watch list.

In other words, there are no checks and balances.

And these next two…:

4. You could be a little terrorist-ish, at least according to someone.

(Given the liberal fad of “Swatting” conservatives – calling the police to report a conservative is dealing drugs and child porn and guns out of their houses, to draw a swat team, it’s not an idle threat).  Or…

5. Or you could just know someone terrorist-y, maybe.

…should make your blood run cold, when you remember #6:

6. And if you’re in a “category” of people determined to be a threat, your threat status could be “upgraded” at the snap of a finger.

The watch-list guidelines explain a process by which the assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism can move an entire “category of individuals” to an elevated threat status. It’s unclear exactly how these categories are defined, but according to the document, there must be “current and credible intelligence information” suggesting that the group is a particular threat to conduct a terrorist act.

And the Obama Administration has designated vast swathes of people who disagree with him as potential terrorists.

If you’re a pro-lifer?  Second Amendment activist?  Tax protester?  Land rights, Tenth Amendment, open-government, anti-war?  You name it – you could find yourself on the watch list for any reason.

Or…no reason at all:

7. Finally, you could just be unlucky.

The process of adding people to the terror watch lists is as imperfect as the intelligence officials tasked with doing so. There have been reports of “false positives,” or instances in which an innocent passenger has been subject to treatment under a no-fly or selectee list because his or her name was similar to that of another individual. In one highly publicized incident in 2005, a 4-year-old boy was nearly barred from boarding a plane to visit his grandmother.

And there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.  There’s no due process; there’s noplace to file an appeal.

You’re screwed. Your liberties can be held hostage by any petty bureaucrat, any ex-spouse, anyone who really, wants to mess you up in the most passive-aggressive yet damaging way possible.

So I’d like to ask Kim Norton (if she takes questions, which she does not) – how many of our civil liberties does she believe should be subject to a secret list with no due process or accountability?

We’ve gone around and around with Representative Kim Norton of Rochester.  Norton, who is retiring from the Legislature after this coming session, is going to be carrying Michael Bloomberg’s water; she’ll be sponsoring, so we’re told, a number of gun control bills.

Not that you can get a straight answer out of her; although she went into great detail in the Rochester Post-Bulletin in which she called for a “conversation about guns”, she also told anyone who wanted to engage in dialog (as opposed to echo-chamber monologue) that she really had no idea what she was going to put into any bill, and had nothing to talk about.

Which is kind of hilarious, if you think about it.

Of course, on Twitter over the holiday weekend, she found a specific proposal to support – from Bloomberg’s chief streetwalker in the Senate, Kirsten Gillibrand.

And her response (below) to MNGOPAC leader Bryan Strawser is one for the record books, and one that every Rochester voter should take up with Ms. Norton:  That’s right – for opposing denying civil rights to people who wind up on a non-transparent, easily-abused, unsupervised grab bag of names collected so willy-nilly it’s become the stuff of folk legends, for which the Feds don’t have to tell why, or even whether, you’re on it, Rep. Norton, one of the DFL’s inner circle thought leaders, equates you with a terrorist.

Remember when Democrats were opposed to mysterious starchambers handing down secret lists of enemies, with no transparency or accountability?  I’ll bet Rep. Nortdon does.

This is today’s DFL.

Question:  Do you suppose anyone in the media will question Rep. Norton on this?

France’s “state of emergency” is trampling whatever civil liberties the French may have actually thought they had.

Which, on the one hand, highlights what a different place the US is – where fundamental human rights are endowed by our creator, not an allowance from a benificent state (although big government has been leaching that away for decades, too).

And on the other, shows how fragile the freedoms are that we take for granted.

It also shows why the most important piece of gun legislation signed by Governor Dayton this past session was the law barring the State from confiscating legal guns during a “state of emergency”.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Liberals want to repeal the Second Amendment to stop gun violence. Seems to me the better solution is to repeal the Fourth Amendment.

If cops can stop-and-frisk anybody at any time for any reason or no reason, then there is no worry about racial profiling so cops can take guns away from the 8% of the population that commits 50% of the murders: young Black men in dangerous neighborhoods.

If cops can kick down any door at any time for any reason, they can disarm drug dealers who use firearms as tools of the trade, to defend their profits and kill poachers on their turf.

And if cops get a report about 20-something losers with a grudge, they can swoop in to take firearms before the next school shooting begins.

Why should anything about you be private from the government?  If you’re not doing anything wrong, you’ve got nothing to hide, right?

Joe Doakes

Heather? Jane?  Joan?

Rep. Norton?

I’d love to get their response…

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

America was founded on the belief that people were endowed by their Creator with certain rights, including the right to life, which carries with it the right to defend one’s life from those who would take it.  A gun-free zone denies effective self-defense which jeopardizes the right to life; it is an unjust law.

 

The classical philosophers from St. Augustine and Abraham Lincoln through Thoreau, Martin Luther King and Gandhi agree we have a moral duty to obey just laws, and a moral duty to disobey unjust laws.

 

Turns out, guns are common on that Oregon college campus despite the gun-free policy.   Lots of classical philosophers there.  Good for them!

 

Joe Doakes

That may be the best hope for democracy that we have; much of our society – at least between the Hudson and the Sierra Madre – is becoming in tune with the idea of nullifying laws by ignoring them.

At least when it comes to gun free zones, speed limits and the like.

You gotta start somewhere.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Remember the court case about the off-duty cop who wasn’t allowed to carry his pistol to a Vikings game?

Here’s why not.

Joe doakes

If you make enough laws, eventually everyone will be a criminal.

The American political class spends a lot of time imitating the British – or trying to – on things like national health care, traffic roundabouts, soccer, gun control…some of them even wish for a parliament.

But here’s hoping they can find the minimal guts to support something anyone smarter than Minnesota’s state government – meaning most everyone – knows is a huge, harmless improvement over the organic original, the e-cigarette?

The [Public Health England] report, which was overseen by Peter Hajek, a professor of clinical psychology at the Wolfson Institute for Preventive Medicine, and Ann McNeill, a professor of psychiatry, psychology, and neuroscience at King’s College London, is very clear on the relative hazards of smoking and vaping:

While vaping may not be 100% safe, most of the chemicals causing smoking-related disease are absent and the chemicals which are present pose limited danger. It has been previously estimated that EC [electronic cigarettes] are around 95% safer than smoking. This appears to remain a reasonable estimate.

The evidence concerning e-cigarettes’ effectiveness in helping smokers quit is more limited but promising:

Recent studies support the Cochrane Review findings that EC can help people to quit smoking and reduce their cigarette consumption. There is also evidence that EC can encourage quitting or cigarette consumption reduction even among those not intending to quit or rejecting other support. It is not known whether current EC products are more or less effective than licensed stop-smoking medications, but they are much more popular, thereby providing an opportunity to expand the number of smokers stopping successfully.

It would seem to be a no-brainer; given a choice between losing the tar, the carbon monoxide, the second-hand smoke and the rest of smoking’s putative irritations, or keeping them but badgering them, go with A).

But “no brainer” is too complicated for Minnesota’s political class.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Eden: God created the world and holds all power over it. Residents have the right to do anything they please except eat of the fruit of one tree.

Monarchy: God delegated His powers to the king, who has the right to do anything he pleases. Residents have no rights, only privileges specifically granted to them by the king.  

United States of America in 1776: God gave all rights and powers to The People; the government has no rights and only the powers specifically granted to it by The Constitution.

Socialism: There is no God. Government bureaucrats hold all power and can do anything they please. Residents have no rights, only privileges specifically granted to them by The Party.

The Obama Administration . . . .

I’ll  take a guess; like Socialism, only with more snide pettiness.

“Prosperity Gospel” televangelists – greasy little parasites on the body of Christ – prey on the gullible to make big bucks.

In response, John Oliver – a greasy evangelist for the Big State – calls for Government to intervene by defining religion.

Which greasy televangelist does more damage?

Was there a time when being published in The New Yorker meant you were a better, smarter, more capable writer than, say, a liberal blogger?

I dimly remember such a time.

But in reading Kalefa Sanneh’s “The Hell You Say” – an apologia for gutting the First Amendment and letting government decide how much freedom of speech we really need, because that’s the way Europe does it.

It’s a target-rich environment of bad research and lazy writing, a bit of journalism of entitlement that would fit in on Minnesota Progressive Project.

Yep.  That bad.

I picked one bit – in which Sanneh argues that unregulated speech as we know it really only started in the past 100 years due to – wait for it – white privilege:

This, in essence, was Justice Holmes’s rationale, in 1919, when he argued in an influential dissent that antiwar anarchists should be free to agitate. “Nobody can suppose that the surreptitious publishing of a silly leaflet by an unknown man, without more, would present any immediate danger,” he wrote. Free-speech advocates typically claim that the value of unfettered expression outweighs any harm it might cause, offering assurances that any such harm will be minimal. But what makes them so sure? America’s free-speech regime is shot through with exceptions, including civil (and, in some states, criminal) laws against libel.

Right.  But defamation requires both untruth and actual, tangible, real damages.  It’s intentionally hard to win a defamation / libel case.  For good reason.

By what rationale do we insist that groups—races, communities of faith—don’t deserve similar protection?

Races?  Who would file the petition?

Communities of faith?  Boy, are us Christians going to go to town when we lawyer up.

Many free-speech arguments turn on a deceptively simple question: what is speech? It’s clear that the protected category excludes all sorts of statements. (The First Amendment will be of no use to someone who writes a fraudulent contract, or who says, “Hand over your wallet and iPhone,” and means it.)

And in not knowing the difference between Speech and Robbery,Sanneh has not only forever destroyed The New Yorker as a source of useful journalism, but ousted Grace Kelly from her throne as the least cogniscent writer in the world.

The howlers come with a density that I’ve only rarely encountered, much less tackled.

Indeed, so insidiously bad is the piece that Greg Lukianoff mobilized ten free speech advocates to tackle and beat Saleh’s piece unconscious.

Read Sanneh to see the id of today’s left in action.

Read Lukianoff to see it dismembered.

There’s your assignment for the day.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

St. Paul wants to spend $1.2 million for body cameras, half of it a grant from the feds.

GoPro costs $500 each.  For the good ones.  Retail.

And there are chinese knockoffs for under $200 that, according to some sources, are even better.

But the political optics aren’t right for that…

What are we buying with the rest of the million dollars?

Joe Doakes

That would be so interesting to find out…

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Guy who’s nuts shoots up his own apartment and sets fire to it.

Another guy who can legally own guns because he wasn’t committed.  The judge let him go.

The problem isn’t guns.  The problem is nuts.  The civil commitment laws make it nearly impossible to put away nuts where they’re unable to obtain guns.  If it were easier to obtain civil commitment, there’d be fewer of these incidents and less work for ACLU lawyers . . . a win-win!

Joe doakes

True.

Which is why it’ll never happen.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

It’s videos like the arrest of Sandra Bland, of cops who act like that, that make ordinary citizens lose respect for all police, which makes police feel more insular and more dependent on each other so they close ranks to protect all cops, even the crappy ones.  It’s a self-inflicted vicious cycle.

And the fact it’s a White cop abusing a Black woman on video isn’t just bad optics; in this Presidency, it’s automatically a racial incident.  The cops as a whole can’t seem to understand that each of these incidents not only inflames the Black community, it’s distasteful to the White community too and reduces our willingness to put up with it.

Look for some cops to get ambushed soon.  That’s how things are handled in the strata of society that can’t raise $500 bail to get their loved one out of a Texas jail – they have no meaningful access to the “justice” system so they utilize “alternative dispute resolution” which comes in 9mm parcels.

I took vacation days to stand the flag line with the Patriot Guard to honor fallen Marines returned from the war.  Armed citizens are taking vacation days to stand guard outside unarmed recruiting centers in Tennessee.  Nobody would volunteer to stand guard over cops having lunch so they aren’t ambushed.  There’s a deep and important lesson there, if only they would learn it.

Joe Doakes

Joe says “look for cops to get ambushed soon”; not sure if he’s counting the two New York cops killed late last year, in the wake of the Ferguson and Garner incidents.

In my 22 years in Saint Paul, I’ve met some good cops, and I’ve met some bad ones.  But it’s dawned on me in recent years that at the moment, “Law Enforcement” as an institution is perilously close to becoming the “Standing Army” that our forefathers warned us about; the arrogant mercenaries that care less about the people they’re defending than about the government that pays them.

I’m hoping some of the good cops figure this out sooner than later.

Wisconsin’s Supreme Court has smacked down the Gestapo-like no -knock raids  on conservative dissidents:

In a ruling [yesterday] morning, the Wisconsin Supreme Court rendered official what observers have long known: Wisconsin Democrats did, in fact, launch a massive, multi-county “John Doe” investigation of the state’s conservatives, featuring extraordinarily broad subpoenas and coordinated “paramilitary” raids of private homes; the “crimes” that provided the investigation’s pretext were not crimes at all, but First Amendment-protected speech; and the legal theory underpinning the investigation was bunk, “unsupported in either reason or law,” as the court put it.

I can maintain a certain amount of intellectual attachment for most political stories – but the Wisconsin KGB makes me genuinely furious:

The raid victims have suffered severe, long-term consequences as a result of these raids. Almost to a person, they say they no longer feel secure in their own homes. They report watching what they say, terrified that overt political involvement could lead their homes to be invaded again. One victim said, “I tried to create a home where the kids always feel safe. Now they know they’re not. They know men with guns can come in their house, and there’s nothing we can do.” Another victim — whose son was home alone when police arrived, guns drawn — is haunted by this chilling thought: “He could have been in the shower. They could have broken the door down. He could have been shot. Over politics.”

The prosecutors involved need to be removed from public life.  I almost tried to type “public service”, but my fingers stopped and started smoking.   In a just world, they’d be perp-walked out of their homes in their underwear in front of the mocking and jeering of their former victims.

A free society can only remain free while the majority are pulling in the same direction – toward freedom.  Laws are, tautologically, needed for “the rule of law”.  Laws – especially excessive laws, which covers most “campaign finance” laws – are also the footholds by which the unscrupulous eat others’ freedoms.

In the 1970s – during Leonid Brezhnev’s kinder, gentler version of the Soviet Union – the gulags of the Lenin and Stalin regimes were largely replaced by “psychiatric hospitals”.

Since disssent from government was considered a mental illness in the Soviet Union, naturally, dissidents needed “treatment”.

Author Dinesh D’Souza – one of the Obama administration’s most prolific and articulate dissidents – got caught up a few years ago in one of the web of speech rationing laws. These laws – commonly referred to as “campaign-finance laws” – are intended to, and eventually will, make all political speech and activity, including (I predict) this blog, potentially prosecutable.

Judges and bureaucrats referring to speech as “illegal” is nothing new; it’s the battle freedom will always have to fight.

But using the psychiatric profession to beat down dissent?  It’s baaaack; D’Souza’s judge has ordered him, for a third time, to seek psychiatric treatment:

D’Souza’s defense counsel Benjamin Brafman provided evidence to the court that the psychiatrist D’Souza was ordered to see found no indication of depression or reason for medication. In addition, the psychologist D’Souza subsequently consulted provided a written statement concluding there was no need to continue the consultation, because D’Souza was psychologically normal and well adjusted.
But Judge Berman, who was appointed by Bill Clinton, disagreed, effectively overruling the judgment of the two licensed psychological counselors the U.S. probation department had approved as part of D’Souza’s criminal sentence.
“I only insisted on psychological counseling as part of Mr. D’Souza’s sentence because I wanted to be helpful,” the judge explained. “I am requiring Mr. D’Souza to see a new psychological counselor and to continue the weekly psychological consultation not as part of his punishment or to be retributive.

Point of basic logic to Judge Berman:  if you’re “requiring” the treatment, you’re not doing it to be helpful.

To a big chunk of the left – and not a few on the far libertarian fringe – America is the worst thing ever.

I don’t bother prodding “progressives” too hard on the subject – why bother?

But with Wahhabi Libertarians, I’ve had a bit of sport asking “OK – if someone gave you an airplane ticket and told you to go somewhere with greater regard for personal liberty and freedom, all and all, where would you go?”

When I get an answer – and it’s a minority that actually tries – it’s usually someplace that’s made a big splash legalizing marijuana or raw milk or hemp jeans, or some other such vital freedom.   Almost inevitably, a quick examination shows the place they want to move crushes free speech, has a confiscatory tax structure, bans civilian gun ownership, has indulgent police powers, or some such.  The exception – the current Libertarian parlor subject, “Liberland“, a small “libertarian state” on the Danube between the Czech Republic and Croatia – would seem to be on the brink of being repoed by the Croatians.  And a liberty that can’t be defended is only a liberty until someone bigger and nastier takes it away (which is among the subjects of a certain book released last month and currently priced to move)

Anyway – the US takes its shots from the left, the right, and the none-of-the-above.  Including yours truly, at times.

And with all of that, it’s good, refreshing, and a useful perspective-check to remember the contortions some people go to to get here.