The Salt Lake Tribune calls for martial law to enforce a mask mandate:

Were Utah a truly civilized place, the governor’s next move would be to find a way to mandate the kind of mass vaccination campaign we should have launched a year ago, going as far as to deploy the National Guard to ensure that people without proof of vaccination would not be allowed, well, anywhere.

Why is it that now, as the public health bureaucracy is finally starting to come around to what most of us have known about this pandemic for a year and a half, that Big Karen is getting crazier and crazier?

Declan Leary, on Muriel Bowser’s vaccine mandate in the District of Columbia – which isn’t all that different from the ones going into “effect” in Minneapolis and Saint Paul

It is all the more concerning given the precedent we risk setting if we tolerate the vaccine mandates. As a number of conservatives have warned repeatedly these last few months, even begrudging compliance with irrational diktats issued by the Covidcrats gives the ruling class valuable strategic ground. Moving forward, we can only expect our government to become less sensible and more immoderate if we refuse to push back now. As TAC’s

Helen Andrews wrote last week, “Once Americans get accustomed to scanning a QR code every time they enter a building, there is no limit to the surveillance and nudges that can be built on top of it.”

So I don’t know what to do here. I could easily comply; I have proof of the jab ready to go right on my phone. I need to show it if I want any part in so much of what makes city life good, worth living even under the rule of a Muriel Bowser and with a not insignificant risk of getting shot on a given day. (This latter point, by the way, calls into question the sincerity of the mayor’s interest in preserving the lives of citizens.) But I am far from convinced that the benefits of compliance—just like the benefits of enforcement—will really outweigh the costs.

I’m in about the same boat:  I’ve had the J&J vaccine (chosen because it was alleged to be best at preventing hospitalization, which given that I had OG Covid in the spring of 2020 was my only actual concern).   I could play the game.

But I am not going to.

This nation has two choices, if we’re to remain a nation (or, potentially, a viable society).

One of them – by far the most radical and traumatic – is secession; from individual states, and maybe from the US itself.

(And no – that wasn’t “settled in 1865” any more than it was settled in 1776. It’s only “illegal” when the secedees have the will to bring the secessionists to heel).

Big media is noting one, fairly welll established, such movement, in greater Oregon:

In the summer of 2015, a chimney sweep in Elgin, Oregon, redrew the map of the American West. “Imagine for a moment Idaho’s western border stretching to the Pacific Ocean,” Grant Darrow wrote in a letter to the editor of his local paper. Rural Oregon, he insisted, should break its ties with the urbanites of Portland and liberals of Salem, and join Idaho. “The political diversity in this state is becoming unpalatable,” he argued. “Rural Oregonians in general and Eastern Oregonians in particular are growing increasingly dismayed by the manner in which Oregon’s Legislature and Oregon’s urban dwellers have marginalized their values, demonized their lifestyle, villainized their resource-based livelihoods, and classified them as second-class citizens at best.”

…

In the half decade or so since Darrow’s diatribe, a simple and outlandish idea, percolating in rural Oregon since the 1960s—what if we were just Idaho?—has grown into a grassroots secession movement. Last month, Harney County, in the high desert of eastern Oregon, became the state’s eighth to pass a nonbinding ballot measure supporting Darrow’s proposal. Move Oregon’s Border signs now dot the region’s empty highways, and Mike McCarter, a retired agricultural nurseryman and gun-club owner who runs a group pushing for the boundary reshuffle, travels the state in a bright-red trucker hat bearing the slogan. “We don’t care to move, because we’re tied to our land here,” he told me recently. “So why not just allow us to be governed by another state?” He mentioned a supporter so certain that her property will become part of Idaho that she already flies its state flag on her lawn. “We’re going to be Idaho,” she told him.

The movement has passed in nearly every county in which it’s gone to the ballot. As the article points out, it seems unlikely the Idaho legislature will accept the new border (which would drive Idaho’s western border to the Pacific – much less Oregon’s California-lite legislature full of unicorn-chasing feebs.

Let’s see – urban lotus-eaters, out of touch with and imposing their dystopian vision on the rest of the state, from a riot-torn city full of people who love central planning? Sounds familiar.

The second option – getting serious about Federalism, checks and balances, and enumerated, divided power, again – would be hypothetically simpler. And, sometimes, I think it would lead just as quickly to mass secession, as Big Left decided to hit the exits.

“But Mitch – why are you an Originalist? Don’t think mankind has evolved in the past 240-odd years?”

Sure – backward.

Case in point: an op-ed in the Boston Glob over the weekend, advocating a rewrite of the first two Amendments of the Constitution. The piece, by one Mary Anne Franks, identified by the Glob as “Distinguished Scholar Chair at the University of Miami School of Law and the author of “The Cult of the Constitution: Our Deadly Devotion to Guns and Free Speech“, opens as follows:

As legal texts go, neither of the two amendments is a model of clarity or precision. More important, both are deeply flawed in their respective conceptualizations of some of the most important rights of a democratic society: the freedom of expression and religion and the right of self-defense.

Well – she’s not wrong per se.

Sanford Levinson’s seminal Yale Law Review article, “The Embarassing Second Amendent” – an article that led, circuitously but certainly over the course of two decades to the Heller and McDonald decisions, makes the same point; the language of the Second Amendment is a wee bit anachronistic, although its legal, historical and textual roots are crystal clear to any point of view not addled by 60 years of activist, revisionist jurisprudence largely tied to risible overextension of the Miller decision.

It’s about there that the good points end. I’ll give Franks points for honesty, at least; her op-ed encapsulates the modern Left’s notion that rights are bestowed by a benevolent government, not endowed us by our creator.

It’s a notion that is, in fact, worth going to war over; ideally, a war of words, if we can keep it that way.

Re the First Amendment:

Every person has the right to freedom of expression, association, peaceful assembly, and petition of the government for redress of grievances, consistent with the rights of others to the same and subject to responsibility for abuses. All conflicts of such rights shall be resolved in accordance with the principle of equality and dignity of all persons.

Both the freedom of religion and the freedom from religion shall be respected by the government. The government may not single out any religion for interference or endorsement, nor may it force any person to accept or adhere to any religious belief or practice.

Perhaps it’s a sign of social perspicacity that Franks feels the need to enshrine the concept that rights – which are, by definition, “consistent with the rights of others to the same and subject to responsibility of abuses” – apply to everyone, or that they shall “be respected by the government”.

But I don’t even want to think about how the Federal judiciary would torture the meaning of “the princinple of equality and dignity of all persons”, after a few decades of abuse by today’s “woke” blue legal academy.

And the Second?:

All people have the right to bodily autonomy consistent with the right of other people to the same, including the right to defend themselves against unlawful force and the right of self-determination in reproductive matters. The government shall take reasonable measures to protect the health and safety of the public as a whole.

The inalienable right to defend one’s self, family, property, community and freedom – to preserve the “bodily autonomy” not of people as individuals (subject to government’s “reasonable measures”, naturally) would become a carrier germ for abortion.

I’ll await Professor Franks’s attempt to get a majority of Congress and the legislatures and governors of 37 states to jam this down.

(My rewrite of the 2nd Amendment, by the way? It’s simple: drop the dependent clause, “A well-regulated militia being necessary to the preservation of a free state”. Cut it down to “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed”. Simple, elegant, and exactly the opposite of Professor Franks’s intent, which is all I really care about).

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals says — no mandate for you:

A federal appeals court has upheld its stay on President Biden’s vaccine-or-test mandate for companies with at least 100 employees.

In a 22-page ruling on Friday, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the mandate was “fatally flawed,” and barred the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) from enforcing the mandate “pending adequate judicial review” of a motion for permanent injunction.

OSHA shall “take no steps to implement or enforce the mandate until further court order,” the ruling stated.

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The mandate, which was supposed to take effect Jan. 4, requires business with at least 100 employees to mandate their workers get vaccinated or undergo frequent testing.

Two predictions:

• Biden and co. will ignore the court ruling; and
• The chorus of MSM scolds will try to justify whatever Biden does. Constitutional crises are so 2020, doncha know.

I write a blog, and do a talk show, that covers a fair amount of politics.

People jump from that to assuming I looooove politics.

It’s not true. Truth be told, I hate ’em.

But just because you’re not interested in politics doesn’t mean they’re not interested in you.

Charles Cook lays it out as well as anyone in this bit here.

Pullquote:

If, like me, you believe without irony, exaggeration, or caveat, that the United States of America remains the last, great hope of mankind, then you have no choice but to fight those who would “transform” it. If, like me, you believe that America was exceptional before its Founding, was exceptional at the time of its Founding, has been exceptional throughout its 250-year history, and remains exceptional to this day, then you have no choice but to resist the entreaties of those who consider its run thus far to have been a pernicious lie. If, like me, you believe that the world benefits enormously from American leadership — and that, if and when we reach the point at which another nation is in the driving seat, we will regret it enormously — then you have no choice but to try to keep it on top. And if, like me, you believe that the American system of government — which represents the only remaining ossification of core Anglo-American ideals in the world — is a work of astonishing genius that must not be tinkered with for temporary political gain, then you have no choice but to defend it to the hilt. I cannot prove this, but I suspect somewhere in my bones that we will get just one shot at America — one — and that if it goes, then so does the classically liberal order that has done wonders for the world.

And in my little, D-lister way, I feel the same. .

One of the great, largely untold, stories of World War 2 was that in the post-war era, the American occupation made such an impression on German society that they ended up taking Federalism to heart to a degree that Americans would feel jealous of, if most of them knew better.

And while it’s not a specific point in the article I’m linking, I’m going to go out on a short, sturdy limb and say that their relatively strict observance of federalism has helped them keep a pragmatic approach to Covid that has largely eluded our centralized public health bureaucracies.

Untrammeled central government hurt Germany terribly, 80 years ago – far worse than Covid has harmed the US. So far.

The power of federalism, not only to help people who don’t like each other much to co-exist politically, but to sand down the rougher edges of government stupidity, is a lesson this country would be blessed to learn, while we can.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

America funded virus gain-of-function research in the Wuhan lab? No, we did no such thing, certainly not.

Oh, THAT gain-of-function research? Oh yeah, we funded that. Our bad.

I’m borrowing Sarah E. Hoyt’s new hashtag, seems appropriate for this situation: #headsonpikes

Joe Doakes

“No, it wasn’t gain of function research. It was research about increasing function. Different thing all together)”

17 Attorneys General from states that still care about civil liberties and separation of powers are lining up against the Feds cramdown against parents pushing back against school boards.

Expect a wave of hysterial pieces on NPR about the stresses of being a school admin in the age of Trump

So let’s take stock of where were at in the Biden administration so far:

• Our shelves are getting kinda bare. “But Merg – you couldn’t find toilet paper during the last year of Drumpf’s regime”. Yep – for free market reasons that actually made sense. Try again.
• The borders are in effect open.
• We have a de facto hostage crisis
• The Taliban in back in control in Afghanistan
• Fuel costs aren’t just rising, they’re skyrocketing.
• Public education is getting even worse.
• The social divides that erupted in violence during the Obama regime have escalated.
• Indeed, inflation is back for the first time since my freshman year of college.
• The executive branch, which as been too poiwerful for a long time, is starting to act on that fact.
• After a year of government acting like a scolding “Karen” of a neighbor and “two weeks to flatten the curve”, not only has Covid gone nowhere, but the economic effects of lockdowns are getting worse.
• The workforce – one of the four key pillars of the economy, along with land, capital and management – has been “unintentionally” distorted far out of whack, with dire consequences.
• China is ratting its sabers as never before.

What am I missing?

The Feds released the specifics on the suspects charged with “armed insurrection” on January 6.

Some knives, none of which were used. Some baseball bats and clubs and various chemical irritants.

Five guns – only two of which were found on the Capitol grounds, one of which was a government issued piece in the hands of a DEA agent with all the necessary paperwork, none of which were fired.

Byron York (with occasional emphasis by me)::

Some of the weapons were obviously brought with the intention of being in a fight. Others were clearly improvised on the spur of the moment; in one case, the deadly or dangerous weapon used was a desk drawer. In another, it was a traffic barrier. In yet another, it was a helmet. That doesn’t mean those objects could not be dangerous; one could beat a person to death with a desk drawer. But it does suggest the rioter did not arrive at the Capitol bent on armed insurrection.

In addition, the overall numbers are relatively small. Eighty-two people charged with weapons-related offenses, out of how many? That is about 12% of the 670 or so currently charged. And 670 is smaller than the total number of rioters on the Capitol grounds on Jan. 6. Does that amount to an “armed insurrection”? Especially when just five people have been charged with possessing firearms, the weapon of choice for modern armed insurrectionists, and one of them didn’t arrive until after it was all over, and none of them fired the weapons, even in the intensity of the physical struggle that day?

And that is the problem with the “armed insurrection” talking point. By any current American standard of civil disorder, what happened on Jan. 6 was a riot. There were some instigators, and there were many more followers. A small number were anticipating a fight, probably with antifa. And as the day went on, some people lost their heads and did things they should regret for a very long time. But a look at the Justice Department prosecutions simply does not make the case that it was an “armed insurrection.”

If this – five guns out of 600+ people charged – is an “armed insurrection”, then the rioters who came to the Midway in May 2020 were Operation Barbarossa.

About this time seven years ago, I was writing the series of blog posts that eventually become my book Trulbert.

The book described a fictional breakdown of society after a financial cataclysm. I did it as satire because, honestly, it seemed like a more effective approach to the subject; Kurt Schlichter is going to put his kids through medical school with the proceeds from his fiction about a second Civil War, and he’s far from alone. And sometime humor is the best journalism.

Which isn’t to say Trulbert was “the best journalism”, but sometimes the indirect approach is the best one.

I’ve pondered doing a follow-up.

And I’m having a really, really hard time getting to “satirical” again. And I think it ties into the G.K. Chesterton quote – “when everything is absurd, satire is impossible”.

The Brandon Administration, and the times it rules over, are impossible to satirize.

I’m trying to figure out the angle for the next book.

A children’s story?

A musical?

I got nothing.

And with this, let’s see if we can do the same in Minnesota someday.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I’ve been following the debate on whether vaccine mandates will cause staffing shortages. Had a few tests done at the hospital this morning. Quietly asked the RN about the vaccine. She hasn’t gotten it, does not intend to. She’s with an “agency” which means she’s not part of the giant conglomerate health care provider and isn’t bound by their rules. She’s seen stuff, read stuff, she affirmed – strictly off the record and between her and me – that I’m not the only one with serious doubts. We’re not crazy no matter what they tell us.

I received excellent care from a non-corporate nurse, for which I am grateful and also amused. The regulation says any employer with more than 100 nurses must . . . oh, we’ve only got 90. Our sister (but completely independent) companies also have 90, each. And each nurse only works 29 hours for each company. They’re exempt. No vaccine. But excellent patient care. And the giant conglomerate can proudly announce their in-house staff is fully vaccinated with no staffing shortage.

Potemkin compliance all the way down. You watch, they’ll be ‘independent contractors’ next.

Joe Doakes

People underestimate the cost of widespread ignoring of laws because they are widely considered to be wrong, stupid, corrosive of freedom and the like.

It doesn’t end well. And it’s not the peoples fault.

To: All Republican Candidates for Everything, Everywhere
From: Mitch Berg, Obstreporous Peasant
Re: Your 2022 Plans

Dear GOPers,

There are a lot of good things to run on against Democrats in this cycle:

• Crime
• The collapse of education
• Crime
• The economy
• Crime

But if you’re not running on the, not merely “erosion”, but the affirmative assault on freedom by the government, you don’t deserve to win, and this nation deserves what awaits.

To wit:

Your mission is – or should be – clear.

That is all.

Buried in the “Infrastructure’ bill is, well, a curious bit of “infrastructure” indeed:

Within a few years, you may have to convince your own car you’re fit to drive every time you get behind the wheel. The Biden administration’s massive infrastructure bill, which the House is expected to take up later this month, includes a provision directing the Secretary of Transportation to develop regulations that will require new cars to contain “advanced drunk and impaired driving prevention technology.”

The law would give regulators two to three years to develop rules mandating technology that would “passively monitor the performance of a driver of a motor vehicle to accurately identify whether that driver may be impaired” as well as “passively and accurately detect whether the blood alcohol concentration of a driver of a motor vehicle” exceeds legal limits. Automakers would have a further three years to comply, though the bill provides leeway for delay if the technology isn’t up to snuff yet—because the tech the bill is requiring is still in development.

Classifying “spying on people via their cars” as “infrastructure” is, if you think about it, disturbingly honest

Vaccine mandates are on the hit list…

…of Black Lives Matter:

At a protest Monday in front of New York restaurant Carmine’s, Chivona Newsome, also a co-founder of the group, said of the vaccine mandates, “What is going to stop the Gestapo, I mean the NYPD, from rounding up black people, from snatching them off the train, off the bus?”

She further issued the threat that BLM was “putting this city on notice that your mandate will not be another racist social distance practice” and that “Black people are not going to stand by, or you will see another uprising .” She said vaccine verification “is not a free passport to racism.”

The catalyst for those remarks was an incident at Carmine’s last week wherein three black women from Texas were charged for assaulting a hostess at the restaurant, allegedly over a vaccine verification dispute and, as a lawyer for the women subsequently claimed, because the hostess, who is of Asian descent, used a racial slur.

And it doesn’t just seem to be just BLM:

Morning Consult found that Biden’s approval dropped a striking 12 points among black voters since September 8th, the day before the White House announced a comprehensive new COVID-19 mitigation plan that included a new OSHA rule, which, when drafted, will demand workplaces with 100 or more employees either require their workers to be vaccinated against COVID or submit to rigorous testing for the virus.

“President Joe Biden’s sweeping federal rules to mandate vaccines hasn’t hurt him with the overall electorate, but it appears to have spurred a weakening of his standing with one of the most reliable pieces of the Democratic Party’s coalition: Black voters,” Morning Consult noted.

Now – getting everyone to connect the dots from “unequal and racially-tone-deaf enforcement of arbitrary Covid regulations” to “unequal and racially tone-deaf policy” in general? That’s the challenge.

A Massachusetts case on its way to the SCOTUS – and hoping to be the roughly 1% of cases granted a review – will have an immense impact on private property rights.

At issue in Desrosiers v. Baker is the legality of several COVID-19 lockdown orders issued throughout 2020 by Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker. The lockdown orders, which were some of the most draconian in the nation, generally banned all private assemblies that did not have a political or religious purpose after 9:30 p.m., no matter the size or location.

The orders imposed significantly stricter restrictions on assembly in “private residences” than on assembly in public settings. The orders encouraged “the public’s unselfish compliance,” and were enforceable variously by misdemeanor criminal penalties, civil fines, and court injunction. These penalties also applied to hosts who failed to cooperate with government requests for “lists of attendees at social gatherings.”

The Massachusetts lockdown orders even included a quasi-adultery ban, in effect at all hours, on assembly involving close physical contact by the un-cohabiting, instead of by the unmarried. Under the orders, “participants who [were] not members of the same household” had to keep six feet of distance from each other at all times. The orders warned that a “gathering shall violate this provision where, no matter the number of participants present, conditions or activities at the gathering are such that it is not reasonably possible for all participants to maintain this degree of separation.”

I’m not sure what I’m more worried about – a Roberts-led majority deciding there’s a prudential reason to allow government extraordinary powers in a state of emergency, or the near-violent reaction of Big Karen to having their power, and their reason for existence, struck down.

OK, definitely more worried about “a”.

I accept “B” as a foregone conclusion.

A state district judge has thrown out a lawsuit by a group of parents Who were seeking an order requiring the governor to issue a state wide mask mandate and to reinstate the state of emergency.

Thankfully, the judge shot the request down:

“While this court is gravely concerned about the public health consequences of the failure of school districts to implement the guidance of the CDC and the Minnesota Department of Health regarding the use of masks for children, teachers, and staff in K-12 public schools,” the judge wrote in his ruling, “the judiciary cannot order a co-equal branch of government to exercise its discretionary, political judgment to implement a specific educational policy.”

In other words…

… (Mitch takes a deep breath)…

…the parents wanted a member of the judicial branch to compel the head of the executive branch do seize all of the authority of the legislative branch.

Sure, we have a public health crisis. We have an even bigger crisis in civics education in this state.

…20 years ago, right after 9/11, when some on the left said the overreaction to the terror attacks 20 years ago tomorrow would actually give the terrorists the win they wanted?

I can’t have been the only one thinking Joe Biden’s speech yesterday must have made Mohammed Atta smile in whatever part of the Great Beyond he’s in now.

The nuts and bolts of the speech, to the extent there were any? The “president” wants to use OSHA to enforce a vaccine mandate on companies with more than 100 employees – as if forcing a medication on employees (and the forced sharing of medical records, and the inevitable shielding of employers from liability when those records are inevitably. misused) is the same as safety shields in ripsaws. We’ll await future presidents using the same precedent to force inoculations against smoking, obesity, and, eventually and inevitably, barring some outbreak of sanity, ideas.

Also – not a single mention of natural immuinity. 50 mllion Americans are known to have been infected and recovered (myself included); that natural immunity is at least as effective as any pharmaceutical – but is being pointedly ignored.

It’s hard to honestly say what was the most concerning part of our “chief of state’s” speech yesterday. I’m not the only one to whom it sounded like a desperate muddle of authoritarian knee-jerks.

His little shot at the governors who are pushing back at his misbegotten authority – how he’s going to use the power of the Federal Government and the Presidency to show them who’s boss?

It sounds like he wants to crush the idea and practice of federalism; like separation of powers is the problem.

Much of it was peoples reactions to the “President”. For example, this weasel:

People on the left have a frightening propensity to see government as a “Parent”, rather than the custodian elected by the “Free Association of Equals” in the Declaration of Independence.

Of course, if you can’t get timeless wisdom from Joy Reid and Steve Schmidt of “The Lincoln Project”, where can you get it?

The scapegoating of the unvaccinated – who, notwithstanding the left’s propaganda machcine, are largely the young, the poor, and Black males from 20-40 years old – was perhaps the most chilling thing about the, er, “speech”.

Thing is, a real leader – I’m looking at you, Ron DeSantis – could get a lot of mileage out of something that’s been pushed to the sidelines throughout this pandemic – the truth. John Hayward has a draft of a part of the speech that could have been:

20 years after 9/11, we have government by decree, an out of control bureaucracy that governs more or less as it wishes unless and until someone musters the numbers or. money to try to clip it, a plutocrat sector that buys its own boutique version of freedom, and a population that’s being conditioned to accept a dystopian shredding of freedom as “the new normal”.

I haven’t written here recently (sorry, Mitch!), mostly because I did a fair amount of traveling in August. I attended my high school reunion in the wilds of Wisconsin, then a week later headed east to a family wedding in the Hocking Hills region of Ohio (highly recommended, by the way).

In the course of my travels, I spent time in six different states — Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. Given that the howling over the dread Delta Variant has been in full effect for much of the summer, I was particularly interested in what I would see in my travels. Were people paying attention to the renewed demands for masking and social distancing? Were the entreaties of the Powers That Be having any effect?

Not a chance.

My high school reunion had over 100 attendees, a good result for a class with 144 surviving members. Classmates returned to my Wisconsin home town from California, Washington state, Colorado, Maryland, and New York, among other places. One classmate arrived masked, but took his mask off about 15 minutes into the festivities. The venue was a local brewery with a beer hall and the entire event was indoors. My masked classmate was the only person I saw wearing a mask all weekend, outside of some of the staff at the hotel. Social distancing? Not much of that, either — as you would expect at a high school reunion, it was hugs galore.

The following week was the family wedding; we took a convoluted path so we could pick up our college-age daughter, who attends school in Missouri. We stopped in Waterloo, Iowa, for lunch — not a mask in sight. We got gas in Hannibal, Missouri — no masks at all. Our overnight hotel was in downstate Illinois — again, no masks or social distancing in sight, and a full buffet breakfast available. We stopped for lunch in Indiana — again, no masks anywhere. We gassed up again on the Indiana/Ohio border, in a town that looked like nothing had changed since 1978. No masks. We reached our destination — no masks at the hotel. We had an out-of-town guest reception — saw every face in the place.

The wedding the following day was wonderful — joyous, raucous, with an open bar and food trucks from Columbus for the meal. There were probably 250 people in attendance; not a soul was wearing a mask. It was an outdoor event, but if social distancing was a factor, no one seemed to realize it. Nothing changed on the return trip. No mask? No problem!

Over this past weekend, we attended the Great Minnesota Grease Together. Everyone had to mask up on the shuttle buses, but once we were at the fair, mask wearing was about 1%, even in the queues for a Sweet Martha bucket before leaving the fairgrounds.

We are reminded daily the Delta Variant is still in full swing, an implacable foe, with future variants lined up like planes in a holding pattern at O’Hare; Mu is coming next, and all the other letters of the Greek alphabet are getting ready to ravage the countryside, so many that we’re likely to run out of letters eventually. Presumably another naming convention waits in the wings — perhaps future variants can be named after Kentucky Derby winners (the “Seattle Slew Variant” perhaps), assuming we can independently verify that neither the horses nor their jockeys ever used Ivermectin. As anyone with a television or a smart phone knows, the hectoring and self-congratulatory moral tutelage continue unabated, all of it fact-checked, verified, or otherwise given the J.D. Power award and a MacArthur Foundation genius grant.

But you know what? Even after a summer of harangues and a phalanx of Tik-Tok Cassandras, people are doing as they please, at least here in flyover land. 

Yes, yes, everything I’m presenting here is anecdotal, but current behaviors are easy to observe and if a skeptic made a similar sojourn, the skeptic would see the same things. There will remain a cohort of those who follow every word and every directive from Drs. Fauci, Osterholm and their colleagues. Most readers of this feature likely see social media posts featuring our bien pensant  betters dutifully wearing their masks and keeping a yardstick or two between them as they struggle to take a selfie. And that’s fine — let your freak flags fly!

In the end, though, it’s highly likely the Safety Dance is over, unless our betters are willing to force compliance. What’s been happening in Australia has given me pause, but mandates and lockdowns will be difficult to enforce. And our betters know it.

I’ve been a big fan of XKCD, the blazingly smart and cunningly simple web-comic, for a long, long time.

10 years? 15? Hard to say.

Which isn’t to say I agree with everything.

Like this bit here:

The word “Tantamount” is three syllables that serve as a front for enough horrible logic to fill all of Weimar Germany to a depth of eight feet. Because only in the world of cartoony quips is waving a flag, or even parroting Nazi (or Communist, for that matter) rhetoric “incitement” per the SCOTUS.

As longtime friend of this blog Sean Sorrentino put it:

Advocacy of force or criminal activity does not receive First Amendment protections if (1) the advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless actionand(2) is likely to incite or produce such action.

“Hey, we should round up all the Jews and put them in concentration camps.”

Not Incitement.

“There’s a Jew, grab him!”

Incitement.

Distasteful? Sure.

Deserving of censure? Absolutely.

Almost always, in our society, the hallmark of people who’ll never have the power to do much of anything, much less the sweeping assaults they’re talking of? Doy.

And of course, the whole “Punch a Nazi” and “Bash the Fash” conceits, combined with definition of “Naziism” and “Fascism” broad enough to cover, say, every single Republican, are the sort of mass dehumanization that leads us directly to…

…to what?

I don’t want to keep seeing the same hands, here.

Big Left – via its wholly owned subsidiaries, Big Government and Big Media – have gotten much exercised about “misinformation” lately. As distinct from “disinformation” – someone actively telling you something that is untrue – “misinformation” is someone telling you anything they disagree with.

Rightly or wrongly.

This campaign has taken many forms – a Scarlet Letter-style whisper campaign on public media, active censorship by private-sector tech companies acting in concert with Big Left.

But what’s next?

Don’t think Big Left isn’t getting ideas:

There was one time since Ronald Reagan left the stage that I felt like this nation had a genuine chance to succeed – with “success” defined as “being the nation that the founding fathers envisioned it being”. That was during the Tea Party.

Kids, ask your parents.

The Tea Party was organic. It was a mass movement that almost entirely led with its its ideals – from leaving its demonstration sites cleaner than we found them, to focusing on its principles more than any mass movement (worth following) I can recall in my lifetime. Fiscal responsibility, federalism, checks and balances, civil liberties, equality, a tamed bureacracy – what wasn’t to like?

Naturally, this was a threat, both to the Democrat party (whom the Tea Party shellacked in the 2010 midterms) but the GOP establishment; both, with their handmaidens and drinking buddies in the media, combined to undercut the movement via the most defamatory attack PR campaign not waged on behalf of a Clinton that I can recall.

Which led to Trump, for better or worse, as millions of workadaddy, hugamommy people figured playing nice wasn’t going to work (notwithstanding the Tea Party having led one of the great electoral tsunamis in history in 2010 and 2012).

The Tea Party has lurked in the shadows, or in some cases been appropriated by hucksters.

It’s time for that to change.

Six months into Joe Biden’s presidency, the opposition to his sweeping agenda is practically nonexistent. This week, in direct violation of his oath of office, President Biden extended a moratorium on evictions despite acknowledging beforehand that doing so would be illegal. Meanwhile, his party is trying to push through a multi-trillion-dollar package that will radically transform the relationship between citizens and government from birth through retirement. This is a five-alarm fire for conservatism and Republicans should be fighting Biden with every tool at their disposal. Instead, Republicans have remained largely silent about his unconstitutional power grab and, far from resisting his spending spree, are greasing the wheels for it by agreeing to pass one of his top priorities — an unnecessary infrastructure bill that is effectively an appendage of the larger social-welfare package…Historically, the path of least resistance was always for Republicans to come to Washington and rubber stamp more spending. At the height of the Tea Party’s power, there was a period during which Republicans were more afraid of voting to increase spending than they were of voting to cut spending. That was an important development that effectively put the brakes on Obama’s legislative agenda after 2010.

It was a brief period – but it showed it could be done.

And that’s what we need to shoot for:

Today, the U.S. is at a scary point in its history. The last time the nation racked up so much debt, it was in response to the short-term crisis of World War II. Yet once that crisis ended, so did the elevated spending.

I’m more than ready to get back to it.

I’m as close as you can get to a First Amendment absolutist.

As a small L libertarian, I’m also big on due process and the restraint of excessive police power.

With all of that said?

I can’t be the only one who wouldn’t of minded seeing this jagoff “bump his head“ getting into the police car.